PRAISE FOR JOHN DOUGLAS’S
MINDHUNTER
“One finally feels that Mr. Douglas’s keen eye for crime-scene
detail and his powerful inductive reasoning cannot be explained
any more than one can explain his murderous quarries’ capacity
for merciless savagery . . . . By the winter of 1981, when Atlanta
became the hunting ground of a cunning killer of black children,
the FBI’s profiles had contributed to the apprehension of so
many murderers that Mr. Douglas was willing to endure public
scorn by announcing that these killings were not hate crimes
perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan, as some believed, but were the
work of a lone black man between twenty-five and twenty-nine
years old. He predicted that the culprit would be ‘a police buff,
drive a police-type vehicle . . . He would have a police-type dog,
either a German shepherd or a Doberman.’ When Wayne
Bertram Williams, a twenty-three-year-old black man, was taken
into custody, he ‘fit our profile in every key respect.’ . . . Mr.
Douglas sets out to produce a good true-crime book, but because
of his insights and the power of his material, he gives us more—
he leaves us shaken, gripped by a quiet grief for the innocent
victims and anguished by the human condition.”
—Dean Koontz, e New York Times Book Review
“John Douglas is a brilliant man . . . . And he’s a great guy, very
articulate, very sweet. I wanted to cast him as Agent Jack
Crawford in the movie.”
—Jonathan Demme, director of e Silence of the Lambs
AN ALTERNATE SELECTION OF
Doubleday Book Club e Literary Guild
Mystery Guild
“John Douglas is the FBI’s pioneer and master of investigative
profiling, and one of the most exciting figures in law
enforcement I’ve had the privilege of knowing . . . . With Mr.
Douglas we explore why there are monsters.”
—Patricia Cornwell, bestselling author of e Body Farm and From Potter’s Field
“A quirky, winning tale of awful crimes and awe-inspiring
detective work . . . Douglas gives us a pair of human eyes
through which to view crimes and criminals that are at once
grotesque and compelling . . . . In the end, MINDHUNTER
rings the bell because Douglas knows what all the great crime
writers know—that the criminologist must be at least as
interesting as the crime. On that score, Douglas fits the profile.”
—Richard Willing, USA Today
“Although Douglas’s profiles reflect years of experience, there’s an
uncanniness about their level of detail: He can predict the make
and color of a killer’s car. In the Trailside Killer case in which
Northern California hikers were slain in 1979, Douglas rightly
predicted the assailant was a stutterer . . . . Called the ‘FBI’s
modern Sherlock Holmes,’ Douglas says he comes up with such
details by going into a trancelike state in which he becomes both
killer and victim . . . . Douglas’s conservative estimate is that
there are between thirty-five and fifty serial killers hard at work
around the country right now, leaving ‘several hundred’ dead
people in their wake each year.”
—Deb Price, e Detroit News
“In this . . . fascinating memoir of his twenty-five-year career
with the FBI, John Douglas contends that psychopathic serial
killers have a warped need to kill . . . . e key to Douglas’s
approach is to look for the ‘signature’—as opposed to the modus
operandi—of serial killers . . . . Douglas is at his best describing
the terrible crimes that were committed and explaining the logic
of his profiling method.”
—Charles P. obae, Houston Chronicle
“A fascinating journey into the thrill killer’s psyche . . . Douglas
seems to have a true gift of instinct. MINDHUNTER is
gripping . . . ”
—Lou Grieco, Dayton (OH) Daily News
“Hannibal Lecter may have been a fictional creation, but his
counterparts exist in real life, and Douglas has tracked down,
testified against or just sat down and talked with dozens of
them . . . . A chilling memoir . . . ”
—Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star
“In his spellbinding new book, the legendary Douglas . . . delves
into much of the gritty how-to of criminal personality
‘profiling.’ . . . He’s downright gifted . . . I defy anyone interested
in psychology, detective work, or logic and puzzle-solving, to put
MINDHUNTER willingly aside once begun.”
—Ann G. Sjoerdsma, Virginian-Pilot
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Contents
Epigraph
PROLOGUE: I Must Be in Hell
1 Inside the Mind of a Killer
2 My Mother’s Name Was Holmes
3 Betting on Raindrops
4 Between Two Worlds
5 Behavioral Science or BS?
6 Taking the Show on the Road
7 e Heart of Darkness
8 e Killer Will Have a Speech Impediment
9 Walking in the Shoes
10 Everybody Has a Rock
11 Atlanta
12 One of Our Own
13 e Most Dangerous Game
14 Who Killed the All-American Girl?
15 Hurting the Ones We Love
16 “God Wants You to Join Shari Faye”
17 Anyone Can Be a Victim
18 Battle of the Shrinks
19 Sometimes the Dragon Wins
Index
To the men and women of the FBI Behavioral Science
and Investigative Support Units, Quantico, Virginia, past
and present— fellow explorers, partners on the journey.
Foul deeds will rise,
ough all the earth o’erwhelm them,
to men’s eyes.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
Author’s Note
is book has been very much a team effort, and it could not
have been accomplished without the tremendous talents and
dedication of each member of that team. Chief among them are
our editor, Lisa Drew, and our project coordinator and “executive
producer” (and Mark’s wife), Carolyn Olshaker. Right from the
beginning, they both shared our vision and provided the
strength, confidence, love, and good counsel that nurtured us
through the effort to realize it. Our profound gratitude and
admiration go equally to Ann Hennigan, our talented researcher;
Marysue Rucci, Lisa’s able, indefatigable, and endlessly cheerful
assistant; and our agent, Jay Acton, who was the first to recognize
the potential of what we wanted to do and then made it happen.
Our special thanks go to John’s father, Jack Douglas, for all of
his recollections and for so carefully documenting his son’s career,
making organization a breeze; and to Mark’s father, Bennett
Olshaker, M.D., for all of his advice and guidance on issues of
forensic medicine and psychiatry and the law. We are both
extremely fortunate to have the families we do, and their love
and generosity are always with us.
Finally, we want to express our appreciation, admiration, and
heartfelt thanks to all of John’s colleagues at the FBI Academy in
Quantico. eir character and contribution is what made the
career chronicled in this work possible, which is why the book is
dedicated to them.
—JOHN DOUGLAS AND MARK OLSHAKER, July 1995
PROLOGUE
I Must Be in Hell
I must be in hell.
It was the only logical explanation. I was tied down and
naked. e pain was unbearable. My arms and legs were being
lacerated by some kind of blade. Every orifice of my body had
been penetrated. I was choking and gagging from something
shoved down my throat. Sharp objects had been stuck in my
penis and rectum and felt like they were tearing me apart. I was
bathed in sweat. en I realized what was happening: I was being
tortured to death by all the killers and rapists and child molesters
I’d put away in my career. Now I was the victim and I couldn’t
fight back.
I knew the way these guys operated; I’d seen it over and over
again. ey had a need to manipulate and dominate their prey.
ey wanted to be able to decide whether or not their victim
should live or die, or how the victim should die. ey’d keep me
alive as long as my body would hold out, reviving me when I
passed out or was close to death, always inflicting as much pain
and suffering as possible. Some of them could go on for days like
that.
ey wanted to show me they were in total control, that I was
completely at their mercy. e more I cried out, the more I
begged for relief, the more I would fuel and energize their dark
fantasies. If I would plead for my life or regress or call out for my
mommy or daddy, that would really get them off.
is was my payback for six years of hunting the worst men
on earth.
My heart was racing, I was burning up. I felt a horrible jab as
they inched the sharp stick even farther up my penis. My entire
body convulsed in agony.
Please, God, if I’m still alive, let me die quickly. And if I’m dead,
deliver me quickly from the tortures of hell.
en I saw an intense, bright white light, just like I’d heard
about people seeing at the moment of death. I expected to see
Christ or angels or the devil—I’d heard about that, too. But all I
saw was that bright white light.
But I did hear a voice—a comforting, reassuring voice, the
most calming sound I’d ever heard.
“John, don’t worry. We’re trying to make it all better.”
at was the last thing I remembered.
•••
“John, do you hear me? Don’t worry. Take it easy. You’re in the
hospital. You’re very sick, but we’re trying to make you better,”
was what the nurse actually said to me. She had no idea whether
or not I could hear her, but she kept repeating it, soothingly, over
and over again.
ough I had no idea at the time, I was in the intensive care
unit of Swedish Hospital in Seattle, in a coma, on life support.
My arms and legs were strapped down. Tubes, hoses, and
intravenous lines penetrated my body. I was not expected to live.
It was early December of 1983, and I was thirty-eight years of
age.
e story begins three weeks earlier, on the other side of the
country. I was up in New York, speaking on criminal-personality
profiling before an audience of about 350 members of the
NYPD, the Transit Police, and the Nassau and Suffolk County,
Long Island, Police Departments. I’d given this speech hundreds
of times and could just about do the whole thing on autopilot.
All of a sudden, my mind started to wander. I was aware I was
still talking, but I’d broken out in a cold sweat and I was saying
to myself, How in hell am I going to handle all these cases? I was
just finishing up with the Wayne Williams child-killing case in
Atlanta and Buffalo’s “.22-Calibre” race murders. I had been
called in to the “Trailside Killer” case in San Francisco. I was
consulting with Scotland Yard on the “Yorkshire Ripper”
investigation in England. I was going back and forth to Alaska,
working on the Robert Hansen case, in which an Anchorage
baker was picking up prostitutes, flying them out into the
wilderness, and hunting them down. I had a serial arsonist
targeting synagogues in Hartford, Connecticut. And I had to fly
out to Seattle the week after next to advise the Green River Task
Force in what was shaping up as one of the largest serial murders
in American history, the killer preying mainly on prostitutes and
transients in the Seattle-Tacoma corridor.
For the past six years, I had been developing a new approach
to crime analysis, and I was the only one in the Behavioral
Science Unit working cases full-time. Everyone else in the unit
was primarily an instructor. I was handling about 150 active
cases at a time with no backup, and I was on the road from my
office at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, about 125 days
a year. e pressure was tremendous from local cops, who
themselves were under tremendous pressure to solve cases, from
the community, and from the families of victims, for whom I
always had enormous empathy. I kept trying to prioritize my
workload, but new requests kept pouring in daily. My associates
at Quantico often said I was like a male whore: I couldn’t say no
to my clients.
During the New York speech, I continued talking about
criminal-personality types, but my mind kept wandering back to
Seattle. I knew that not everyone on the task force wanted me
there, that was par for the course. As in every major case for
which I was called in to provide a new service that most cops and
many Bureau officials still considered one step removed from
witchcraft, I knew I’d have to “sell” them. I had to be persuasive
without being overconfident or cocky. I had to let them know I
thought they’d done a thorough, professional job while still
trying to convince the skeptics the FBI might be able to help.
And perhaps most daunting, unlike the traditional FBI agent
who dealt with “Just the facts, ma’am,” my job required me to
deal in opinions. I lived with the constant knowledge that if I was
wrong, I could throw a serial investigation far off the mark and
get additional people killed. Just as bad, it would hammer the lid
on the new program of criminal-personality profiling and crime
analysis I was struggling to get off the ground.
en there was the traveling itself. I had already been to
Alaska on several occasions, crossing four time zones, connecting
to a white-knuckle flight close to the water and landing in
darkness, and practically as soon as I got there and met with the
local police, I would get back on the plane and fly down to
Seattle.
e free-floating anxiety attack lasted maybe a minute. I kept
saying to myself, Hey, Douglas, regroup. Get a grip on yourself. And
I was able to do it. I don’t think anyone in that room knew
anything was wrong. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that
something tragic was going to happen to me.
I couldn’t shake this premonition, and when I got back to
Quantico, I went to the personnel office and took out additional
life insurance and income-protection insurance in case I became
disabled. I can’t say exactly why I did this, except for that vague
but powerful feeling of dread. I was physically run-down; I was
exercising too much and probably drinking more than I should
have been to cope with the stress. I was having difficulty sleeping,
and when I did fall asleep, often I’d be awakened by a call from
someone needing my instant help. When I would go back to
sleep, I’d try to force myself to dream about the case in hopes
that that would lead me to some insight about it. It’s easy enough
in retrospect to see where I was headed, but at the time there
didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.
Just before I left for the airport, something made me stop off
at the elementary school where my wife, Pam, taught reading to
learning disabled students, to tell her about the extra insurance.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, very concerned. I
had a wicked headache on the right side and she said my eyes
were bloodshot and strange-looking.
“I just wanted you to know about everything before I left,” I
replied. At that time, we had two young daughters. Erika was
eight and Lauren was three.
For the trip to Seattle, I brought along two new special agents,
Blaine McIlwain and Ron Walker, to break them in on the case.
We arrived in Seattle that night and checked into the Hilton
Hotel downtown. As I was unpacking, I noticed I had only one
black shoe. Either I hadn’t packed the other one or somehow I’d
lost it along the way. I would be making a presentation to the
King County Police Department the next morning, and I
decided I couldn’t go on without my black shoes. I have always
been something of a flashy dresser, and in my fatigue and stress, I
became obsessed with having black shoes to wear with my suit.
So I tore out into the downtown streets, rushed around until I
found an open shoe store, and came back to the hotel, even more
exhausted, with a suitable pair of black shoes.
e next morning, a Wednesday, I made my presentation to
the police and a team that included Port of Seattle representatives
and two local psychologists who had been brought in to help
with the investigation. Everyone was interested in my profile of
the killer, whether there could be more than one offender, and
what type of individual he, or they, might be. I tried to get across
the point that in this type of case, the profile wouldn’t be all that
important. I was pretty sure of what kind of guy the killer would
turn out to be, but just as sure there’d be a lot of guys who would
easily fit the description.
More important in this ongoing cycle of murders, I told
them, was to begin going proactive, using police efforts and the
media to try to lure the guy into a trap. For example, I suggested
the police might set up a series of community meetings to
“discuss” the crimes. I was reasonably certain the killer would
show up at one or more of these. I also thought it would help
answer the question of whether we were dealing with more than
one offender. Another ploy I wanted the police to try was to
announce to the press that there had been witnesses to one of the
abductions. I felt that might draw out the killer to take his own
“proactive strategy” and come forward to explain why he might
have been innocently seen in the vicinity. e one thing of which
I felt most certain was that whoever was behind these kills wasn’t
going to burn out.
I then gave the team advice on how to interrogate potential
subjects—both those they generated on their own and the many
sad crazies who inevitably come forward in a high-profile case.
McIlwain, Walker, and I spent the rest of the day touring body
dump sites, and by the time we got back to the hotel that
evening, I was wiped out.
Over drinks at the hotel bar, where we were trying to unwind
from the day, I told Blaine and Ron I wasn’t feeling well. I still
had the headache, thought I might be coming down with the flu,
and asked them to cover for me with the police the next day. I
thought I might feel better if I spent the next day in bed, so
when we said good night, I put the Do Not Disturb sign on my
door and told my two associates I’d rejoin them Friday morning.
All I remember is feeling terrible, sitting on the side of the
bed and beginning to undress. My two fellow agents went back
to the King County Courthouse on ursday to follow up on the
strategies I had outlined the day before. As I’d requested, they left
me alone all day to try to sleep off my flu.
But when I didn’t show up for breakfast on Friday morning,
they began to get concerned. ey called my room. ere was no
answer. ey went to the room and knocked on the door.
Nothing.
Alarmed, they went back to the front desk and demanded a
key from the manager. ey came back upstairs and unlocked
the door, only to find the security chain on. But they also heard
faint moaning from inside the room.
ey kicked in the door and rushed inside. ey found me on
the floor in what they described as a “froglike” position, partially
dressed, apparently trying to reach the telephone. e left side of
my body was convulsing, and Blaine said I was “burning up.”
e hotel called Swedish Hospital, which immediately
dispatched an ambulance. In the meantime, Blaine and Ron
stayed on the phone with the emergency room, giving them my
vitals. My temperature was 107 degrees, my pulse, 220. My left
side was paralyzed, and in the ambulance I continued having
seizures. e medical report described me with “doll’s eyes”—
open, fixed, and unfocused.
As soon as we arrived at the hospital, they packed me in ice
and began massive intravenous doses of phenobarbital in an
attempt to control the seizures. e doctor told Blaine and Ron
he could practically have put the entire city of Seattle to sleep
with what they were giving me.
He also told the two agents that despite everyone’s best efforts,
I was probably going to die. A CAT scan showed the right side of
my brain had ruptured and hemorrhaged from the high fever.
“In layman’s terms,” the doctor told them, “his brain has been
fried to a crisp.”
It was December 2, 1983. My new insurance had become
active the day before.
My unit chief, Roger Depue, went to Pam’s school to give her
the news in person. en she and my father, Jack, flew out to
Seattle to be with me, leaving the girls with my mother, Dolores.
Two agents from the FBI’s Seattle Field Office, Rick Mathers and
John Biner, picked them up at the airport and brought them
straight to the hospital. at’s when they knew how serious it
was. e doctors tried to prepare Pam for my death and told her
that even if I lived, I’d probably be blind and vegetative. Being a
Catholic, she called in a priest to give me last rites, but when he
found out I was Presbyterian, he refused. So Blaine and Ron gave
him the hook and found another priest who didn’t seem to have
these hang-ups. ey asked him to come pray for me.
I hovered in the coma between life and death all week. e
rules of the intensive care unit allowed only family members to
visit, so my Quantico colleagues and Rick Mathers and others
from the Seattle Field Office suddenly became close relatives.
“You’ve certainly got a big family,” one of the nurses commented
wryly to Pam.
e idea of the “big family” wasn’t a complete joke in one
sense. Back at Quantico, a number of my colleagues, led by Bill
Hagmaier of the Behavioral Science Unit and Tom Columbell of
the National Academy, took up a collection so that Pam and my
dad could stay out in Seattle with me. Before long, they’d taken
in contributions from police officers from all over the country. At
the same time, arrangements were being made to fly my body
back to Virginia for burial in the military cemetery at Quantico.
Toward the end of the first week, Pam, my father, the agents,
and the priest formed a circle around my bed, joined hands, and
took my hands in theirs and prayed over me. Late that night, I
came out of the coma.
I remember being surprised to see Pam and my father and
being confused about where I was. Initially, I couldn’t talk; the
left half of my face drooped and I still had extensive paralysis on
my left side. As my speech came back, it was slurred at first. After
a while I found I could move my leg, then gradually, more
movement returned. My throat was painfully sore from the lifesupport tube. I was switched from phenobarbital to Dilantin to
control the seizures. And after all the tests and scans and spinal
taps, they finally offered a clinical diagnosis: viral encephalitis
brought on or complicated by stress and my generally weakened
and vulnerable condition. I was lucky to be alive.
But the recovery was painful and discouraging. I had to learn
to walk again. I was having memory problems. To help me
remember the name of my primary physician, Siegal, Pam
brought in for me a figurine of a seagull made of shells and
sitting on a cork base. e next time the doctor came to give me
a mental status exam and asked if I remembered his name, I
slurred, “Sure, Dr. Seagull.”
Despite the wonderful support I was getting, I was
tremendously frustrated with the rehabilitation. I’d never been
able to sit around or take things slow. FBI director William
Webster called to encourage me. I told him I didn’t think I could
shoot anymore.
“Don’t worry about that, John,” the director replied. “We
want you for your mind.” I didn’t tell him I was afraid there
wasn’t much of that left, either.
I finally left Swedish Hospital and came home two days before
Christmas. Before leaving, I presented the emergency room and
ICU staffs with plaques expressing my profound gratitude for all
they had done to save my life.
Roger Depue picked us up at Dulles Airport and drove us to
our house in Fredericksburg, where an American flag and a huge
“Welcome Home, John” sign were waiting. I had dropped from
my normal 195 to 160 pounds. My kids, Erika and Lauren, were
so upset by my appearance and the fact that I was in a wheelchair
that for a long time afterward, they were afraid every time I went
away on a trip.
Christmas was pretty melancholy. I didn’t see many friends;
only Ron Walker, Blaine McIlwain, Bill Hagmaier, and another
agent from Quantico, Jim Horn. I was out of the wheelchair, but
moving around was still difficult. I had trouble carrying on a
conversation. I found I cried easily and couldn’t count on my
memory. When Pam or my dad would drive me around
Fredericksburg, I’d notice a particular building and not know if it
was new. I felt like a stroke victim and wondered if I’d ever be
able to work again.
I was also bitter at the Bureau for what they’d put me
through. e previous February, I’d spoken with an assistant
director, Jim McKenzie. I told him I didn’t think I could keep up
the pace and asked him if he could get me some people to help
out.
McKenzie was sympathetic but realistic. “You know this
organization,” he’d said to me. “You have to do something until
you drop before anyone will recognize it.”
Not only did I feel I wasn’t getting support, I felt I wasn’t
getting any appreciation, either. Quite the contrary, in fact. e
previous year, after working my butt off in the Atlanta “Child
Murders” case, I was officially censured by the Bureau for a story
that appeared in a newspaper in Newport News, Virginia, just
after Wayne Williams was apprehended. e reporter asked me
what I thought of Williams as a suspect, and I replied that he
looked “good,” and that if he panned out, he’d probably be good
for at least several of the cases.
Even though the FBI had asked me to do the interview, they
said I was speaking inappropriately about a pending case. ey
claimed I’d been warned before doing a People magazine
interview a couple of months before. It was typical of
government bureaucracy. I was hauled up before the Office of
Professional Responsibility at headquarters in Washington, and
after six months of bureaucratic tap dancing, I got a letter of
censure. Later, I would get a letter of commendation for the case.
But at the time, this was the recognition from the Bureau for
helping crack what the press was then calling the “crime of the
century.”
So much of what a law enforcement officer does is difficult to
share with anyone, even a spouse. When you spend your days
looking at dead and mutilated bodies, particularly when they’re
children, it’s not the kind of thing you want to bring home with
you. You can’t say over the dinner table, “I had a fascinating lust
murder today. Let me tell you about it.” at’s why you so often
see cops drawn to nurses and vice versa—people who can relate
in some way to each other’s work.
And yet often when I was out in the park or the woods, say,
with my own little girls, I’d see something and think to myself,
at’s just like the such-and-such scene, where we found the eightyear-old. As fearful as I was for their safety, seeing the things I
saw, I also found it difficult to get emotionally involved in the
minor, but important, scrapes and hurts of childhood. When I
would come home and Pam would tell me that one of the girls
had fallen off her bike and needed stitches, I’d flash to the
autopsy of some child her age and think of all the stitches it had
taken the medical examiner to close her wounds for burial.
Pam had her own circle of friends who were involved with
local politics, which didn’t interest me at all. And with my travel
schedule, she ended up with the lion’s share of responsibility for
raising the children, paying the bills, and running the house. is
was one of the many problems with the marriage at the time, and
I know that at least our oldest, Erika, was aware of the tension.
I couldn’t shake my resentment at the Bureau organization for
letting this happen to me. About a month after I returned home,
I was out burning leaves in the backyard. On an impulse, I went
in, collected all the copies of profiles I had in the house, all the
articles I’d written, carried them outside, and threw them all onto
the fire. It felt like a catharsis, just getting rid of all of this stuff.
Some weeks after that, when I could drive again, I went to
Quantico National Cemetery to see where I would have been
buried. Graves are positioned by date of death, and if I had died
on December 1 or 2, I would have gotten a lousy site. I noticed it
happened to be near that of a young girl who had been stabbed
to death on her driveway not far from where I lived. I’d worked
on her case and the murder was still unsolved. As I stood there
ruminating, I recalled how many times I’d advised police to
surveil grave sites when I thought the killer might visit, and how
ironic it would be if they were watching here and picked me up
as a suspect.
Four months after my collapse in Seattle, I was still out on
sick leave. I’d developed blood clots in my legs and lungs as a
complication of the illness and so much time in bed, and I still
felt as if I was struggling to get through every day. I still didn’t
know if I’d physically be able to work again and didn’t know if I’d
have the confidence even if I could. In the meantime, Roy
Hazelwood, from the instructional side of the Behavioral Science
Unit, was doubling up and had taken on the burden of handling
my ongoing cases.
I made my first visit back to Quantico in April of 1984 to
address an in-service group of about fifty profilers from FBI field
offices. I stepped into the classroom, wearing slippers because my
feet were still swollen from blood clots, and got a standing
ovation from these agents from all over the country. e reaction
was spontaneous and genuine from the people who, better than
anyone, understood what I did and what I was trying to institute
within the Bureau. And for the first time in many months, I felt
cherished and appreciated. I also felt as if I had come home.
I went back to work full-time a month later.
1
Inside the Mind of a Killer
Put yourself in the position of the hunter.
at’s what I have to do. ink of one of those nature films: a
lion on the Serengeti plain in Africa. He sees this huge herd of
antelope at a watering hole. But somehow—we can see it in his
eyes—the lion locks on a single one out of those thousands of
animals. He’s trained himself to sense weakness, vulnerability,
something different in one antelope out of the herd that makes it
the most likely victim.
It’s the same with certain people. If I’m one of them, then I’m
on the hunt daily, looking for my victim, looking for my victim
of opportunity. Let’s say I’m at a shopping mall where there are
thousands of people. So I go into the video arcade, and as I look
over the fifty or so children playing there, I’ve got to be a hunter,
I’ve got to be a profiler, I’ve got to be able to profile that potential
prey. I’ve got to figure out which of those fifty children is the
vulnerable one, which one is the likely victim. I have to look at
the way the child is dressed. I have to train myself to pick up the
nonverbal clues the child is putting out. And I have to do this all
in a split second, so I have to be very, very good at it. en, once
I decide, once I make my move, I’ve got to know how I am going
to get this child out of the mall quietly and without creating any
fuss or suspicion when his or her parents are probably two stores
down. I can’t afford to make any mistakes.
It’s the thrill of the hunt that gets these guys going. If you
could get a galvanic skin response reading on one of them as he
focuses in on his potential victim, I think you’d get the same
reaction as from that lion in the wilderness. And it doesn’t matter
whether we’re talking about the ones who hunt children, who
hunt young women or the elderly or prostitutes or any other
definable group—or the ones who don’t seem to have any
particular preferred victim. In some ways, they’re all the same.
But it is the ways they are different, and the clues that they
leave to their individual personalities, that have led us to a new
weapon in the interpretation of certain types of violent crimes,
and the hunting, apprehension, and prosecution of their
perpetrators. I’ve spent most of my professional career as an FBI
special agent trying to develop that weapon, and that’s what this
book is about. In the case of every horrible crime since the
beginning of civilization, there is always that searing,
fundamental question: what kind of person could have done
such a thing? e type of profiling and crime-scene analysis we
do at the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit attempts to answer
that question.
Behavior reflects personality.
It isn’t always easy, and it’s never pleasant, putting yourself in
these guys’ shoes—or inside their minds. But that’s what my
people and I have to do. We have to try to feel what it was like
for each one.
Everything we see at a crime scene tells us something about
the unknown subject—or UNSUB, in police jargon—who
committed the crime. By studying as many crimes as we could,
and through talking to the experts—the perpetrators themselves
—we have learned to interpret those clues in much the same way
a doctor evaluates various symptoms to diagnose a particular
disease or condition. And just as a doctor can begin forming a
diagnosis after recognizing several aspects of a disease
presentation he or she has seen before, we can make various
conclusions when we see patterns start to emerge.
One time in the early 1980s when I was actively interviewing
incarcerated killers for our in-depth study, I was sitting in a circle
of violent offenders in the ancient, stone, gothic Maryland State
Penitentiary in Baltimore. Each man was an interesting case in
his own right—a cop killer, a child killer, drug dealers, and
enforcers—but I was most concerned with interviewing a rapistmurderer about his modus operandi, so I asked the other
prisoners if they knew of one at the prison I might be able to talk
to.
“Yeah, there’s Charlie Davis,” one of the inmates says, but the
rest agree it’s unlikely he’ll talk to a fed. Someone goes to find
him in the prison yard. To everyone’s surprise, Davis does come
over and join the circle, probably as much out of curiosity or
boredom as any other reason. One thing we had going for us in
the study is that prisoners have a lot of time on their hands and
not much to do with it.
Normally, when we conduct prison interviews—and this has
been true right from the beginning—we try to know as much as
we can about the subject in advance. We go over the police files
and crime-scene photos, autopsy protocols, trial transcripts;
anything that might shed light on motives or personality. It’s also
the surest way to make certain the subject isn’t playing selfserving or self-amusing games with you and is giving it to you
straight. But in this case, obviously, I hadn’t done any
preparation, so I admit it and try to use it to my advantage.
Davis was a huge, hulking guy, about six foot five, in his early
thirties, clean-shaven, and well groomed. I start out by saying,
“You have me at a disadvantage, Charlie. I don’t know what you
did.”
“I killed five people,” he replies.
I ask him to describe the crime scenes and what he did with
his victims. Now, it turns out, Davis had been a part-time
ambulance driver. So what he’d do was strangle the woman, place
her body by the side of a highway in his driving territory, make
an anonymous call, then respond to the call and pick up the
body. No one knew, when he was putting the victim on the
stretcher, that the killer was right there among them. is degree
of control and orchestration was what really turned him on and
gave him his biggest thrill. Anything like this that I could learn
about technique would always prove extremely valuable.
e strangling told me he was a spur-of-the-moment killer,
that the primary thing on his mind had been rape.
I say to him, “You’re a real police buff. You’d love to be a cop
yourself, to be in a position of power instead of some menial job
far below your abilities.” He laughs, says his father had been a
police lieutenant.
I ask him to describe his MO: he would follow a goodlooking young woman, see her pull into the parking lot of a
restaurant, let’s say. rough his father’s police contacts, he’d be
able to run a license-plate check on the car. en, when he had
the owner’s name, he’d call the restaurant and have her paged and
told she’d left her lights on. When she came outside, he’d abduct
her—push her into his car or hers, handcuff her, then drive off.
He describes each of the five kills in order, almost as if he’s
reminiscing. When he gets to the last one, he mentions that he
covered her over in the front seat of the car, a detail he
remembers for the first time.
At that point in the conversation, I turn things further
around. I say, “Charlie, let me tell you something about yourself:
You had relationship problems with women. You were having
financial problems when you did your first kill. You were in your
late twenties and you knew your abilities were way above your
job, so everything in your life was frustrating and out of control.”
He just sort of nods. So far, so good. I haven’t said anything
terribly hard to predict or guess at.
“You were drinking heavily,” I continue. “You owed money.
You were having fights with the woman you lived with. [He
hadn’t told me he lived with anyone, but I felt pretty certain he
did.] And on the nights when things were the worst, you’d go out
on the hunt. You wouldn’t go after your old lady, so you had to
dish it out to someone else.”
I can see Davis’s body language gradually changing, opening
up. So, going with the scant information I have, I go on, “But
this last victim was a much more gentle kill. She was different
from the others. You let her get dressed again after you raped her.
You covered up her head. You didn’t do that with the previous
four. Unlike the others, you didn’t feel good about this one.”
When they start listening closely, you know you’re onto
something. I learned this from the prison interviews and was able
to use it over and over in interrogation situations. I see I have his
complete attention here. “She told you something that made you
feel bad about killing her, but you killed her anyway.
Suddenly, he becomes red as a beet. He seems in a trancelike
state, and I can see that in his mind, he’s back at the scene.
Hesitantly, he tells me the woman had said her husband was
having serious health problems and that she was worried about
him; he was sick and maybe dying. is may have been a ruse on
her part, it may not have been—I don’t have any way of
knowing. But clearly, it had affected Davis.
“But I hadn’t disguised myself. She knew who I was, so I had
to kill her.”
I pause a few moments, then say, “You took something from
her, didn’t you?”
He nods again, then admits he went into her wallet. He took
out a photograph of her with her husband and child at
Christmas and kept it.
I’d never met this guy before, but I’m starting to get a firm
image of him, so I say, “You went to the grave site, Charlie, didn’t
you?” He becomes flushed, which also confirms for me he
followed the press on the case so he’d know where his victim was
buried. “You went because you didn’t feel good about this
particular murder. And you brought something with you to the
cemetery and you put it right there on that grave.”
e other prisoners are completely silent, listening with rapt
attention. ey’ve never seen Davis like this. I repeat, “You
brought something to that grave. What did you bring, Charlie?
You brought that picture, didn’t you?” He just nods again and
hangs his head.
is wasn’t quite the witchcraft or pulling the rabbit out of
the hat it might have seemed to the other prisoners. Obviously, I
was guessing, but the guesses were based on a lot of background
and research and experience my associates and I had logged by
that time and continue to gather. For example, we’d learned that
the old cliché about killers visiting the graves of their victims was
often true, but not necessarily for the reasons we’d originally
thought.
Behavior reflects personality.
One of the reasons our work is even necessary has to do with
the changing nature of violent crime itself. We all know about
the drug-related murders that plague most of our cities and the
gun crimes that have become an everyday occurrence as well as a
national disgrace. Yet it used to be that most crime, particularly
most violent crime, happened between people who in some way
knew each other.
We’re not seeing that as much any longer. As recently as the
1960s, the solution rate to homicide in this country was well
over 90 percent. We’re not seeing that any longer, either. Now,
despite impressive advances in science and technology, despite
the advent of the computer age, despite many more police
officers with far better and more sophisticated training and
resources, the murder rate has been going up and the solution
rate has been going down. More and more crimes are being
committed by and against “strangers,” and in many cases we have
no motive to work with, at least no obvious or “logical” motive.
Traditionally, most murders and violent crimes were relatively
easy for law enforcement officials to comprehend. ey resulted
from critically exaggerated manifestations of feelings we all
experience: anger, greed, jealousy, profit, revenge. Once this
emotional problem was taken care of, the crime or crime spree
would end. Someone would be dead, but that was that and the
police generally knew who and what they were looking for.
But a new type of violent criminal has surfaced in recent years
—the serial offender, who often doesn’t stop until he is caught or
killed, who learns by experience and who tends to get better and
better at what he does, constantly perfecting his scenario from
one crime to the next. I say “surfaced” because, to some degree,
he was probably with us all along, going back long before 1880s
London and Jack the Ripper, generally considered the first
modern serial killer. And I say “he” because, for reasons we’ll get
into a little later, virtually all real serial killers are male.
Serial murder may, in fact, be a much older phenomenon
than we realize. e stories and legends that have filtered down
about witches and werewolves and vampires may have been a
way of explaining outrages so hideous that no one in the small
and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could
comprehend the perversities we now take for granted. Monsters
had to be supernatural creatures. ey couldn’t be just like us.
Serial killers and rapists also tend to be the most bewildering,
personally disturbing, and most difficult to catch of all violent
criminals. is is, in part, because they tend to be motivated by
far more complex factors than the basic ones I’ve just
enumerated. is, in turn, makes their patterns more confusing
and distances them from such other normal feelings as
compassion, guilt, or remorse.
Sometimes, the only way to catch them is to learn how to
think like they do.
Lest anyone think I will be giving away any closely guarded
investigative secrets that could provide a “how-to” to would-be
offenders, let me reassure you on that point right now. What I
will be relating is how we developed the behavioral approach to
criminal-personality profiling, crime analysis, and prosecutorial
strategy, but I couldn’t make this a how-to course even if I
wanted to. For one thing, it takes as much as two years for us to
train the already experienced, highly accomplished agents
selected to come into my unit. For another, no matter how much
the criminal thinks he knows, the more he does to try to evade
detection or throw us off the track, the more behavioral clues he’s
going to give us to work with.
As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say many
decades ago, “Singularity is almost invariably a clue. e more
featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to
bring it home.” In other words, the more behavior we have, the
more complete the profile and analysis we can give to the local
police. e better the profile the local police have to work with,
the more they can slice down the potential suspect population
and concentrate on finding the real guy.
Which brings me to the other disclaimer about our work. In
the Investigative Support Unit, which is part of the FBI’s
National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico,
we don’t catch criminals. Let me repeat that: we do not catch
criminals. Local police catch criminals, and considering the
incredible pressures they’re under, most of them do a pretty
damn good job of it. What we try to do is assist local police in
focusing their investigations, then suggest some proactive
techniques that might help draw a criminal out. Once they catch
him—and again, I emphasize they, not we—we will try to
formulate a strategy to help the prosecutor bring out the
defendant’s true personality during the trial.
We’re able to do this because of our research and our
specialized experience. While a local midwestern police
department faced with a serial-murder investigation might be
seeing these horrors for the first time, my unit has probably
handled hundreds, if not thousands, of similar crimes. I always
tell my agents, “If you want to understand the artist, you have to
look at the painting.” We’ve looked at many “paintings” over the
years and talked extensively to the most “accomplished” “artists.”
We began methodically developing the work of the FBI’s
Behavioral Science Unit, and what later came to be the
Investigative Support Unit, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
And though most of the books that dramatize and glorify what
we do, such as Tom Harris’s memorable e Silence of the Lambs,
are somewhat fanciful and prone to dramatic license, our
antecedents actually do go back to crime fiction more than crime
fact. C. August Dupin, the amateur detective hero of Edgar Allan
Poe’s 1841 classic “e Murders in the Rue Morgue,” may have
been history’s first behavioral profiler. is story may also
represent the first use of a proactive technique by the profiler to
flush out an unknown subject and vindicate an innocent man
imprisoned for the killings.
Like the men and women in my unit a hundred and fifty
years later, Poe understood the value of profiling when forensic
evidence alone isn’t enough to solve a particularly brutal and
seemingly motiveless crime. “Deprived of ordinary resources,” he
wrote, “the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent,
identifies himself therewith, and not infrequently sees thus, at a
glance, the sole methods by which he may seduce into error or
hurry into miscalculation.”
ere’s also another small similarity worth mentioning.
Monsieur Dupin preferred to work alone in his room with the
windows closed and the curtains drawn tight against the sunlight
and the intrusion of the outside world. My colleagues and I have
had no such choice in the matter. Our offices at the FBI
Academy in Quantico are several stories underground, in a
windowless space originally designed to serve as the secure
headquarters for federal law enforcement authorities in the event
of national emergency. We sometimes call ourselves the National
Cellar for the Analysis of Violent Crime. At sixty feet below
ground, we say we’re ten times deeper than dead people.
e English novelist Wilkie Collins took up the profiling
mantle in such pioneering works as e Woman in White (based
on an actual case) and e Moonstone. But it was Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle’s immortal creation, Sherlock Holmes, who
brought out this form of criminal investigative analysis for all the
world to see in the shadowy gaslit world of Victorian London.
e highest compliment any of us can be paid, it seems, is to be
compared to this fictional character. I took it as a real honor
some years back when, while I was working a murder case in
Missouri, a headline in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat referred to
me as the “FBI’s Modern Sherlock Holmes.”
It’s interesting to note that at the same time Holmes was
working his intricate and baffling cases, the real-life Jack the
Ripper was killing prostitutes in London’s East End. So
completely have these two men on opposite sides of the law, and
opposite sides of the boundary between reality and imagination,
taken hold of the public consciousness that several “modern”
Sherlock Holmes stories, written by Conan Doyle admirers, have
thrown the detective into the unsolved Whitechapel murders.
Back in 1988, I was asked to analyze the Ripper murders for a
nationally broadcast television program. I’ll relate my conclusions
about this most famous UNSUB in history later in this book.
It wasn’t until more than a century after Poe’s “Rue Morgue”
and a half century after Sherlock Holmes that behavioral
profiling moved off the pages of literature and into real life. By
the mid-1950s, New York City was being rocked by the
explosions of the “Mad Bomber,” known to be responsible for
more than thirty bombings over a fifteen-year period. He hit
such public landmarks as Grand Central and Pennsylvania
Stations and Radio City Music Hall. As a child in Brooklyn at
the time, I remember this case very well.
At wit’s end, the police in 1957 called in a Greenwich Village
psychiatrist named Dr. James A. Brussel, who studied
photographs of the bomb scenes and carefully analyzed the
bomber’s taunting letters to newspapers. He came to a number of
detailed conclusions from the overall behavioral patterns he
perceived, including the facts that the perpetrator was a
paranoiac who hated his father, obsessively loved his mother, and
lived in a city in Connecticut. At the end of his written profile,
Brussel instructed the police:
Look for a heavy man. Middle-aged. Foreign born.
Roman Catholic. Single. Lives with a brother or sister.
When you find him, chances are he’ll be wearing a
double-breasted suit. Buttoned.
From references in some of the letters, it seemed a good bet
that the bomber was a disgruntled current or former employee of
Consolidated Edison, the city’s power company. Matching up the
profile to this target population, police came up with the name
of George Metesky, who had worked for Con Ed in the 1940s
before the bombings began. When they went up to Waterbury,
Connecticut, one evening to arrest the heavy, single, middleaged, foreign-born Roman Catholic, the only variation in the
profile was that he lived not with one brother or sister but with
two maiden sisters. After a police officer directed him to get
dressed for the trip to the station, he emerged from his bedroom
several minutes later wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned.
Illuminating how he reached his uncannily accurate
conclusions, Dr. Brussel explained that a psychiatrist normally
examines an individual and then tries to make some reasonable
predictions about how that person might react to some specific
situation. In constructing his profile, Brussel stated, he reversed
the process, trying to predict an individual from the evidence of
his deeds.
Looking back on the Mad Bomber case from our perspective
of nearly forty years, it actually seems a rather simple one to
crack. But at the time, it was a real landmark in the development
of what came to be called behavioral science in criminal
investigation, and Dr. Brussel, who later worked with the Boston
Police Department on the Boston Strangler case, was a true
trailblazer in the field.
ough it is often referred to as deduction, what the fictional
Dupin and Holmes, and real-life Brussel and those of us who
followed, were doing was actually more inductive—that is,
observing particular elements of a crime and drawing larger
conclusions from them. When I came to Quantico in 1977,
instructors in the Behavioral Science Unit, such as the pioneering
Howard Teten, were starting to apply Dr. Brussel’s ideas to cases
brought to them in their National Academy classes by police
professionals. But at the time, this was all anecdotal and had
never been backed up by hard research. at was the state of
things when I came into the story.
I’ve talked about how important it is for us to be able to step
into the shoes and mind of the unknown killer. rough our
research and experience, we’ve found it is equally important—as
painful and harrowing as it might be—to be able to put ourselves
in the place of the victim. Only when we have a firm idea of how
the particular victim would have reacted to the horrible things
that were happening to her or him can we truly understand the
behavior and reactions of the perpetrator.
To know the offender, you have to look at the crime.
In the early 1980s, a disturbing case came to me from the
police department of a small town in rural Georgia. A pretty
fourteen-year-old girl, a majorette at the local junior high school,
had been abducted from the school bus stop about a hundred
yards from her house. Her partially clothed body was discovered
some days later in a wooded lovers’-lane area about ten miles
away. She had been sexually molested, and the cause of death was
blunt-force trauma to the head. A large, blood-encrusted rock
was lying nearby.
Before I could deliver my analysis, I had to know as much
about this young girl as I could. I found out that though very
cute and pretty, she was a fourteen-year-old who looked fourteen,
not twenty-one as some teens do. Everyone who knew her
assured me she was not promiscuous or a flirt, was not in any
way involved with drugs or alcohol, and that she was warm and
friendly to anyone who approached her. Autopsy analysis
indicated she had been a virgin when raped.
is was all vital information to me, because it led me to
understand how she would have reacted during and after the
abduction and, therefore, how the offender would have reacted
to her in the particular situation in which they found themselves.
From this, I concluded that the murder had not been a planned
outcome, but was a panicked reaction due to the surprise (based
on the attacker’s warped and delusional fantasy system) that the
young girl did not welcome him with open arms. is, in turn,
led me closer to the personality of the killer, and my profile led
the police to focus on a suspect in a rape case from the year
before in a nearby larger town. Understanding the victim also
helped me construct a strategy for the police to use in
interrogating this challenging suspect, who, as I predicted he
would, had already passed a lie-detector test. I will discuss this
fascinating and heartbreaking case in detail later on. But for now,
suffice it to say that the individual ended up confessing both to
the murder and the earlier rape. He was convicted and sentenced
and, as of this writing, is on Georgia’s death row.
When we teach the elements of criminal-personality profiling
and crime-scene analysis to FBI agents or law enforcement
professionals attending the National Academy, we try to get them
to think of the entire story of the crime. My colleague Roy
Hazelwood, who taught the basic profiling course for several
years before retiring from the Bureau in 1993, used to divide the
analysis into three distinct questions and phases—what, why, and
who:
What took place? is includes everything that might be
behaviorally significant about the crime.
Why did it happen the way it did? Why, for example, was
there mutilation after death? Why was nothing of value taken?
Why was there no forced entry? What are the reasons for every
behaviorally significant factor in the crime?
And this, then, leads to:
Who would have committed this crime for these reasons?
at is the task we set for ourselves.
2
My Mother’s Name Was
Holmes
My mother’s maiden name was Holmes, and my parents almost
chose that as my middle name instead of the more prosaic
Edward.
Other than that, as I look back, not much about my early
years indicated any particular future as a mindhunter or criminal
profiler.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, near the border with
Queens. My father, Jack, was a printer with the Brooklyn Eagle.
When I was eight, concerned about the rising crime rate, he
moved us to Hempstead, Long Island, where he became
president of the Long Island Typographical Union. I have one
sister, Arlene, four years older, and from early on she was the star
of the family, both academically and athletically.
I was no academic standout—generally a B-/C+ student—but
I was polite and easygoing and always popular with the teachers
at Ludlum Elementary despite my mediocre performance. I was
mostly interested in animals and at various times kept dogs, cats,
rabbits, hamsters, and snakes—all of which my mother tolerated
because I said I wanted to be a veterinarian. Since this endeavor
showed promise of a legitimate career, she encouraged me down
this path.
e one pursuit in school for which I did show a flair was
telling stories, and this might, in some way, have contributed to
my becoming a crime investigator. Detectives and crime-scene
analysts have to take a bunch of disparate and seemingly
unrelated clues and make them into a coherent narrative, so
storytelling ability is an important talent, particularly in
homicide investigations, where the victim can’t relate his or her
own story,
At any rate, I often used my talent to get out of doing real
work. I remember once in ninth grade, I was too lazy to read a
novel for an oral book report before the class. So when my turn
came (I still can’t believe I had the balls to do this), I made up the
title of a phony book, made up a phony author, and began telling
this story about a group of campers around a campfire at night.
I’m making it up as I go along, and I’m thinking to myself,
How long can I keep pulling this off? I’ve got this bear stealthily
stalking up on the campers, just about to pounce, and at that
point I lose it. I start cracking up and have no choice but to
confess to the teacher that I’d made up the whole thing. It must
have been the guilty conscience, proving I wasn’t a complete
criminal personality. I’m up there, exposed as a fake, knowing
I’m going to flunk, about to be embarrassed in front of all my
peers, and I can already anticipate what my mother’s going to say
when she finds out.
But to my surprise and amazement, the teacher and the other
kids are totally into the story! And when I tell them I’ve been
making it up, they all say, “Finish it. Tell us what happens next.”
So I did, and walked away with an A. I didn’t tell this to my own
children for a long time because I didn’t want them to think that
crime does pay, but I learned from it that if you can sell people
your ideas and keep them interested, you can often get them to
go along with you. is has helped me innumerable times as a
law officer when I had to sell my own superiors or a local police
department on the value of our services. But I have to admit that
to a certain extent, it’s the same talent that con men and criminal
predators use to get by.
By the way, my fictitious campers did end up escaping with
their lives, which was far from a foregone conclusion since my
real love was animals. So, in preparation for becoming a vet, I
spent three summers on dairy farms in upstate New York in the
Cornell Farm Cadet Program sponsored by the university’s
veterinary school. is was a great opportunity for city kids to
get out and live with nature, and in exchange for this privilege, I
worked seventy to eighty hours a week at $15 per, while my
school friends back home were sunning themselves at Jones
Beach. If I never milk another cow, I won’t feel a huge void in my
life.
All of this physical labor did get me in good shape for sports,
which was the other consuming passion of my life. At
Hempstead High School, I pitched for the baseball team and
played defensive tackle in football. And as I look back on it, this
was probably the first real surfacing of my interest in personality
profiling.
On the mound, it rather quickly dawned on me that throwing
hard and accurate pitches was only half the battle. I had a solid
fastball and a pretty decent slider, but a lot of high school
pitchers had that, or equivalent stuff. e key was to be able to
psych out the batter, and I realized that that had mainly to do
with establishing an air of confidence for yourself and making
the guy standing at the plate as insecure as possible. is came
into play in a remarkably analogous way years later when I began
developing my interrogation techniques.
In high school, I was already six foot two, which I used to my
advantage. Talent-wise, we were a so-so team in a good league,
and I knew it was up to the pitcher to try to be a field leader and
set a winning tone. I had pretty good control for a high schooler,
but I decided not to let the opposing batters know this. I wanted
to appear reckless, not quite predictable, so the batters wouldn’t
dig in at the plate. I wanted them to think that if they did, they
risked being brushed back or even worse by this wild man sixty
feet away.
Hempstead did have a good football team, for which I was a
188-pound defensive lineman. Again, I realized the psychological
aspect of the game was what could give us an edge. I figured I
could take on the bigger guys if I grunted and groaned and
generally acted like a nut. It didn’t take long before I got the rest
of the linemen to behave the same way. Later, when I regularly
worked on murder trials in which insanity was used as a defense,
I already knew from my own experience that the mere fact that
someone acts like a maniac does not necessarily mean he doesn’t
know exactly what he’s doing.
In 1962, we were playing Wantagh High for the orpe
Award, the trophy for the best high school football team on Long
Island. ey outweighed us by about forty pounds a man, and
we knew chances were good we were going to get the crap
knocked out of us before a full house. So before the game, we
worked out a set of warm-up drills whose sole objective was to
psych out and intimidate our opponents. We formed up in two
lines with the first man in one line tackling—practically decking
—the first man in the other line. is was accompanied by all
the appropriate grunts and groans and shrieks of pain. We could
see from the faces of the Wantagh players that we were having
the intended effect. ey must have been figuring, “If these
jokers are stupid enough to do that to each other, God knows
what they’ll do to us.”
In fact, the entire episode was carefully choreographed. We
practiced wrestling throws so we could appear to hit the ground
hard, but without getting hurt. And when we got into the actual
game, we kept up the general level of craziness to make it appear
we’d only been let out of the asylum for this one afternoon and
were going straight back as soon as the game was over. e
contest was close all the way, but when the dust finally settled, we
had won, 14–13, and captured the orpe Award for 1962.
My first brush with “law enforcement,” in fact, my first “real”
experience with profiling, came at age eighteen, when I got a job
as a bouncer in a bar and club in Hempstead called the Gaslight
East. I was so good at it that later I was given the same position
at the Surf Club in Long Beach. At both places, my two main
responsibilities were to keep out those below legal drinking age—
in other words, anyone younger than me—and to short-circuit or
break up the inevitable fights that crop up in places where
alcohol is consumed.
Standing at the door, I would request an ID from anyone
whose age was questionable, then ask the person for his or her
date of birth to see if it matched up. is is pretty standard
procedure and it’s what everyone expects, so they’re all prepared
for it. Seldom will a kid who’s gone to the trouble of coming up
with a fake ID be so careless as to fail to memorize the birth date
on it. Looking straight into their eyes as I questioned them was
an effective technique with some people, particularly girls, who
generally have a more developed social conscience at that age.
But those who want to get in can still get past most scrutiny if
they just concentrate on their acting for a few moments.
What I was actually doing while I quizzed each group of kids
as they got to the front of the line was discreetly scrutinizing the
people about three or four rows back—watching them as they
prepared to be questioned, observing their body language,
noticing if they looked at all nervous or tentative.
Breaking up fights was more of a challenge, and for that I fell
back on my athletic experience. If they see a look in your eyes
that tells them you’re not quite predictable and you act just a
little overtly screwy, then sometimes even the big guys will think
twice about tangling with you. If they think you’re just off
enough not to be worried about your own safety, then you
become a far more dangerous opponent. Almost twenty years
later, for example, when we were conducting the prison
interviews for the major serial-killer study, we learned that the
typical assassin personality is far more dangerous in certain
crucial ways than the typical serial-killer personality. Because
unlike the serial killer, who will only choose a victim he thinks he
can handle and then will go to elaborate lengths to avoid capture,
the assassin is obsessively concerned with his “mission” and is
generally willing to die to achieve it.
e other consideration in making people have a particular
opinion of you—such as that you’re irrational and crazy enough
to do something unpredictable—is that you have to maintain
that persona all the time on the job, not just when you think
people are looking at you. When I interviewed Gary Trapnell, a
notorious armed robber and airplane hijacker, at the federal
prison in Marion, Illinois, he claimed that he could fool any
prison psychiatrist into believing he had any mental illness I
cared to specify. e key to pulling it off, he informed me, was to
behave that way all the time, even alone in your cell, so that
when they interviewed you, you wouldn’t have to “think” your
way through it, which was what gave you away. So, long before I
had the benefit of this type of “expert” advice, I seemed to have
some instinct for thinking like a criminal.
When I couldn’t manage to scare people out of a fight at the
bar, I tried to use my amateur profiling techniques to do the next
best thing and head it off before it got serious. I found that with
a little experience, by closely observing behavior and body
language, I was able to correlate this with the sort of action that
ended up breaking out into fights so I could anticipate if an
individual was about to start something. In that case, or when in
doubt, I always pounced first, using the element of surprise and
attempting to get the potential offender out of the building and
back out into the street before he knew exactly what was
happening to him. I always say that most sexual killers and serial
rapists become skilled in domination, manipulation, and control
—the same skills I was trying to master in a different context.
But at least I was learning.
When I graduated from high school, I still wanted to be a vet,
but my grades weren’t nearly good enough for Cornell. e best I
could do to get a similar type of program was Montana State. So
in September of 1963, the Brooklyn and Long Island boy headed
out to the heart of Big Sky country.
e culture shock upon arriving in Bozeman couldn’t have
been greater.
“Greetings from Montana,” I wrote in one of my early letters
home, “where men are men and sheep are nervous.” Just as
Montana seemed to embody all the stereotypes and clichés of
western and frontier life to me, that is how I came across to the
people I met there as an easterner. I joined the local chapter of
Sigma Phi Epsilon, which was composed almost exclusively of
local boys, so I stood out like a sore thumb. I took to wearing a
black hat, black clothing, and black boots and sported long
sideburns like a character out of West Side Story, which was very
much how New Yorkers like me were perceived in those days.
So I made the most of it. At all the social gatherings, the locals
would be wearing western garb and dancing the two-step, while I
had spent the last several years religiously watching Chubby
Checker on TV and knew every conceivable variation of the
twist. Because my sister, Arlene, was four years older than I was,
she’d long before enlisted me as her practice dance partner, so I
quickly became the dance instructor for the entire college
community. I felt like a missionary going into some remote area
that had never before heard English spoken.
I had never had much of a reputation as a scholar, but now
my grades hit an all-time low as I concentrated on everything
but. I’d already worked as a bouncer in a bar in New York, but
here in Montana, the drinking age was twenty-one, which was a
real comedown to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t let that stop me.
My first run-in with the law happened when one of my
fraternity brothers and I had taken out these two swell girls who
had met in a home for unwed mothers. ey were mature for
their age. We stopped at a bar and I went in to buy a six-pack.
e bartender says, “Show me your ID.” So I show him this
phony Selective Service card, carefully done. From my bouncer
experience, I’d learned some of the pitfalls and mistakes of false
identification.
e guy looks at the card and says, “Brooklyn, huh? You guys
back East are big bastards, aren’t you?” I kind of laugh selfconsciously, but everyone in the bar has turned around, so I
know there are witnesses now. I get back out to the parking lot
and we drive away drinking this beer, and unbeknownst to me,
one of the girls put the beer cans on the trunk of the car.
All of a sudden, I hear a police siren. A cop stops us. “Get out
of the car.”
So we get out of the car. He starts searching us, and even at
the time I know this is an illegal search, but I’m certainly not
going to mouth off to him. As he gets down, he’s exposing his
gun and billy club to me, and I get this crazy flash that in a split
second, I could take the club, crunch him on the head, grab the
gun, and take off. Fortunately for my future, I didn’t. But
knowing he’s getting to me, I take my ID out of my wallet and
stuff it down into my under-shorts.
He takes all four of us back to the station, separates us, and
I’m really sweating because I know what they’re doing and I’m
afraid the other guy is going to cop out on me.
One of the officers says to me, “Now, son, you tell us. If that
guy back at the bar didn’t ask for your ID, we’ll go back there.
We’ve had trouble with him before.”
I respond, “Back where I come from, we don’t rat on people.
We don’t do that kind of stuff.” I’m playing George Raft, but I’m
really thinking to myself, Of course he asked for my ID, and I gave
him a phony one! All the while, it’s slipped so low in my shorts,
it’s pinching my vitals. I don’t know if they’re going to stripsearch us or what. I mean, this is the frontier out here as far as
I’m concerned, and God knows what they do. So I quickly size
up the situation and feign illness. I tell them I’m sick and have to
use the rest room.
ey let me go in unaccompanied, but I’ve seen too many
movies, so when I get in there and look in the mirror, I’m afraid
they’re looking at me from the other side. I go way to the side of
the room, stick my hands down my pants, and pull out the ID,
then I go over to the sink and make out as if I’m throwing up in
case they’re watching. I go over to the stalls and flush the
Selective Service card down the john, then come back with a lot
more confidence. I ended up with a $40 fine and probation.
My second encounter with the Bozeman police came my
sophomore year, and it was worse.
I go to a rodeo along with two other guys from back East and
one guy from Montana. We’re leaving at the end, driving a ’62
Studebaker, and we have beer in the car, so here we go again. It’s
snowing like crazy. e kid at the wheel is from Boston, I’m in
the front passenger seat, and the local is between us. Anyway, the
guy driving goes through a stop sign, and—wouldn’t you know
it?—there’s a cop right there. at seems to be the hallmark of
my Montana life. Whatever they say about cops not being
around when you need them—not true in Bozeman in 1965.
So this idiot fraternity brother of mine—I can’t believe it—he
doesn’t stop! He takes off with this cop in the back in hot
pursuit.
Every time we make a turn and get out of the cop’s view for a
second, I’m throwing beer cans out of the car. We keep driving
and reach this residential neighborhood, hitting speed bumps:
boom, boom, boom. We come to a roadblock; the cop must have
radioed ahead. We drive right around the roadblock, up across
someone’s lawn. All the time, I’m yelling, “Stop the goddamned
car! Get me out of here!” But this idiot keeps going. e car’s
spinning, it’s still snowing like crazy, then right behind us we
hear the sirens.
We reach an intersection. He slams on the brakes, the car goes
into a 360-spin, the door flies open, and I’m thrown out of the
car. I’m hanging by the door and my ass is dragging in the snow
on the ground, and all of a sudden someone yells, “Run!”
So we run. All in different directions. I end up in an alley,
where I find an empty pickup truck and get in. I’d ditched my
black hat while I was running, and I’m wearing a reversible black
and gold jacket, so I take it off and turn the gold side outward
for some disguise. But I’m sweating and fogging up the windows.
I’m thinking, Oh, shit, they’re going to be able to see me. And I’m
afraid the owners are going to come back any minute, and out
here, they probably have guns. So I wipe off a small area on the
glass so I can see out, and there’s all kinds of activity around the
car we’ve abandoned: cop cars, tracking dogs, you name it. And
now they’re coming up the alley, their flashlights are shining on
the pickup, and I’m about ready to shit my pants. But I can’t
believe that they drive right by and leave me there!
I steal back to school and everyone’s already heard about this
thing, and I find out that the other two eastern guys and I got
away, but they caught the one from Montana and he spilled his
guts. He names names and they come after each of us. When
they get to me, I cop a plea that I wasn’t in control of the car,
that I was scared and pleading with the guy to stop. Meanwhile,
the driver from Boston gets thrown in a jail cell with springs and
no mattress, bread and water and the whole bit, while my
incredible luck holds out and I just get slapped with another $40
fine for possession of alcohol, and probation.
But they notify the school, they notify our parents, who are all
royally pissed off, and things aren’t going any better academically.
I have a straight-D average, I’ve failed a speech class because I
never went to class—which is my all-time low since I’d always
felt that being able to talk was about my best asset—and I’m not
figuring out any way to pull myself out of this morass. By the
end of the second year, it’s clear that my adventure in the western
wilderness is at an end.
If it appears that all of my memories from this period are of
mishaps and personal screwups, that’s the way it seemed to me at
the time. I came home from college, living under the eyes of my
disappointed parents. My mother was especially upset, knowing
now I’d never become a veterinarian. As usual when I didn’t
know what to do with myself, I fell back on my athletics and
took a job lifeguarding for the summer of 1965. When the
summer ended and I wasn’t going back to school, I found a job
running the health club at the Holiday Inn in Patchogue.
Not long after I started working there, I met Sandy, who
worked at the hotel as a cocktail waitress. She was a beautiful
young woman with a young son and I was instantly crazy about
her. She looked spectacular in her little cocktail outfit. I was still
in great shape physically from all of my exercise and working out,
and she seemed to like me, too. I was living at home and she
would call me all the time. My father would say to me, “Who the
hell is calling you all hours of the day and night? ere’s always
this child crying and screaming in the background.”
Living at home didn’t provide the opportunity for much
action, but Sandy told me that if you worked at the hotel, you
could get an unbooked room really cheap. So one day we got a
room together.
e next morning, early, the phone rings. She answers it and I
hear, “No! No! I don’t want to talk to him!”
As I wake up, I say, “Who is that?”
She says, “e front desk. ey said my husband’s here and
he’s on his way up.”
Now I’m wide awake. I say, “Your husband? What do you
mean, your husband! You never told me you were still married!”
She pointed out that she’d never told me she wasn’t, either,
then went on to explain that they were separated.
Big deal, I’m thinking as I begin to hear this maniac running
down the hall.
He starts pounding on the door. “Sandy! I know you’re in
there, Sandy!”
e room had a window onto the hallway made of glass
louvers, and he’s tearing at them, trying to rip them off the
frame. Meanwhile, I’m looking for a place to jump from—we
were on the second floor—but there’s no window for me to jump
out of.
I ask, “Does this guy carry guns or anything?”
“Sometimes he carries a knife,” she says.
“Oh, shit! at’s great! I’ve got to get out of here. Open the
door.”
I get into this pugilistic stance. She opens the door. e
husband comes running in. He comes straight at me. But then
he sees me in silhouette in the shadows, and I must look big and
tough, so he changes his mind and stops.
But he’s still yelling: “You son of a bitch! You get the hell out
of here!”
Figuring I’ve been macho enough for one day—and it’s still
early—I say, very politely, “Yes, sir. I was just going as it was.” I’d
lucked out again, getting out of another scrape with my hide
intact. But I couldn’t avoid the truth that everything in my life
was going to hell. Incidentally, I’d also cracked the front axle of
my father’s Saab racing my friend Bill Turner’s red MGA.
It was early one Saturday morning that my mother came into
my room with a letter from Selective Service saying they wanted
to see me. I went down to Whitehall Street in Manhattan for a
military physical with three hundred other guys. ey had me do
deep knee bends and you could hear the cracking as I went
down. I’d had cartilage taken out of my knee from football, just
like Joe Namath, but he must have had a better lawyer. ey held
up the decision on me for a while, but eventually I was informed
that Uncle Sam did, indeed, want me. Rather than take my
chances in the Army, I quickly signed up for the Air Force, even
though it meant a four-year hitch, figuring there were better
educational opportunities there. Maybe that was just what I
needed. I sure as hell hadn’t made much of educational
opportunities in New York or Montana.
ere was another reason for going for the Air Force at that
point. is was 1966 and Vietnam was escalating. I wasn’t
terribly political, generally considering myself a Kennedy
Democrat because of my father, who was an official of the Long
Island printers’ union. But the notion of having my ass shot off
in support of a cause I understood only vaguely wasn’t all that
appealing. I’d remembered an Air Force mechanic once telling
me that they were the only service in which the officers—the
pilots—went into combat while the enlisted men stayed back to
support them. Having no intention of becoming a pilot, that
sounded okay to me.
I was sent to Amarillo, Texas, for basic training. Our flight
(what an Air Force training class is called) of fifty was about
evenly divided between New Yorkers like myself and southern
boys from Louisiana. e drill instructor was always on the
northerners’ asses, and most of the time I thought it was justified.
I tended to hang around with the southerners, whom I found
more likable and far less obnoxious than my fellow New Yorkers.
For a lot of young men, basic training is a stressful experience.
With all the discipline I’d experienced from coaches in team
contact sports, and as much of a jerk-off as I’d acknowledged to
myself I’d been the last several years, I found the DI’s rap almost
a joke. I could see through all his head trips and psych jobs, and I
was already in good physical condition, so basic training was
kind of a snap for me. I qualified quickly as an expert marksman
on the M16, which was probably a carryover from the aim I’d
developed as a high school pitcher. Up until the Air Force, the
only riflery experience I’d had was shooting out streetlamps with
a BB gun as a young teen.
During basic training I was developing another sort of badass
reputation. Pumped up from lifting weights and with my head
shaved close, I became known as “the Russian Bear.” A guy in
another flight had a similar reputation, and someone got the
bright idea that it would be good for base morale if we boxed
each other.
e bout was a big event on base. We were very evenly
matched, and each of us refused to give an inch. We ended up
beating the holy hell out of each other, and I got my nose broken
for the third time (the first two having come during high school
football).
For whatever it was worth, I ended up third out of the fifty in
my flight. After basic training, I was given a battery of tests and
told I was well qualified for radio-intercept school. But radiointercept school was filled and I didn’t feel like waiting around
until the next class began, so they made me a clerk typist—even
though I couldn’t type. ere was an opening in Personnel at
Cannon Air Force Base, about a hundred miles away outside of
Clovis, New Mexico.
So that’s where I ended up, spending all day long pecking out
DD214s—military discharge papers—with two fingers, working
for this idiot sergeant and saying to myself, I have to get out of
here.
Again, here’s where my luck comes in. Right next door to
Personnel was Special Services. When I say this, most people
think of Special Forces, like the Green Berets. But this was
Special Services, specifically, Special Services—Athletics. With
my background, that seemed an excellent way to defend my
country in its time of need.
I start snooping around, listening at the door, and I hear one
of the guys in there saying, “is program’s going to hell. We just
don’t have the right guy.”
I’m thinking to myself, this is it! So I walk around, knock on
the door, and say, “Hello, I’m John Douglas, let me tell you a
little about my background.”
As I talk, I’m looking at them for reactions and “profiling” the
kind of guy they want. And I know I’m clicking, because they
keep looking at each other like, “is is a miracle! He’s exactly
what we want!” So they get me transferred out of Personnel, and
from that day forward, I never had to wear a uniform, they paid
me extra money as an enlisted man for running all the athletic
programs, I became eligible for Operation Bootstrap, where the
government paid 75 percent of my education costs to go to
school at nights and on weekends—which I did, at Eastern New
Mexico University in Portales, twenty-five miles away. Since I
had to overcome my D average from college, I had to get all A’s
to stay in the program. But for the first time, I felt as if I had
some focus.
I did such a good job of representing the Air Force in such
rigorous sports as tennis, soccer, and badminton that eventually
they put me in charge of the base golf course and pro shop, even
though I’d never played a hole in my life. But I did look great
running all the tournaments in my Arnold Palmer sweaters.
One day the base commander comes in and he wants to know
what compression ball he should use for this particular
tournament. I had no idea what he was talking about, and like
my ninth-grade book report almost ten years before, I got found
out.
“How in hell did you end up running this thing?” he wanted
to know. I was immediately taken off golf and moved into
women’s lapidary, which sounded exciting until I found out it
meant stonework. I was also put in charge of women’s ceramics
and the officers’ club pool. I’m thinking, these officers are flying
over Vietnam getting their asses shot and I’m here getting chairs
and towels for their flirtatious wives and teaching their kids how
to swim and they’re paying me extra for this while I get my
college degree?
My other responsibility seemed to hearken back to my
bouncer days. e pool was next to the officers’ bar, which was
often full of young pilots training with the Tactical Air
Command. More than once I had to pull wild, drunken pilots
off of each other or off of me.
About two years into my Air Force hitch, while I was
pursuing my undergraduate degree, I found out about a local
association that helped handicapped children. ey needed help
with their recreational programs, so I volunteered. Once a week,
accompanied by a couple of civilian staffers, I took about fifteen
children roller-skating or to play miniature golf or bowling or to
some type of sports situation where the kids could develop their
individual skills and abilities.
Most of the youngsters faced serious challenges such as
blindness or Down’s syndrome or severe motor-control problems.
It was tiring work, for example, skating around and around a
rink with a child in each arm, trying to make sure they didn’t
hurt themselves, but I absolutely loved it. In fact, I’ve had few
other experiences in life I’ve enjoyed as much.
When I pulled up in my car at their school each week, the
kids would all run out to greet me, crowd around the car, and
then I’d get out and we’d all hug. At the end of each weekly
session, they were all as sad to see me leave as I was to have to go.
I felt I was getting so much out of it, so much love and
companionship at a time in my life when I wasn’t really getting it
from any other sources, that I started coming in in the evenings
to read stories to them.
ese children were such a contrast to the healthy, so-called
normal kids I worked with on the base who were used to being
the centers of attention and getting everything they wanted from
their parents. My “special” children were so much more
appreciative of anything that was done for them and, in spite of
their handicaps, were always so friendly and eager for adventure.
Unbeknownst to me, I was being observed much of the time I
spent with the children. It must say something about my powers
of observation that I never found out! At any rate, my
“performance” was being evaluated by members of the Eastern
New Mexico University psychology department, who then
offered me a four-year scholarship in special education.
ough I had been thinking about industrial psychology, I
loved the kids and thought this might be a good choice. In fact, I
could stay in the Air Force and become an officer with this as a
career. I submitted the university’s offer to the base’s civilian-run
personnel board, but after consideration, they decided the Air
Force didn’t need anyone with a degree in special education. I
thought this was rather strange because of all the dependents on
base, but that was their decision. So I gave up my thoughts of
going into special ed as a career, but continued the volunteer
work I loved so much.
Christmas of 1969, I was going home to see my family. I had
to drive the hundred miles back to Amarillo to catch the plane to
New York, and my Volkswagen Beetle wasn’t in such great shape
for the trip. So my best friend in the Air Force, Robert LaFond,
swaps me his Karmann Ghia for the trip. I didn’t want to miss
the Special Services Christmas party, but that was the only way I
could get to Amarillo in time for the flight.
When I got off the plane at La Guardia, my parents met me.
ey looked grim, almost shell-shocked, and I couldn’t figure out
why. After all, I was turning my life around and finally giving
them reason not to be disappointed in me.
What had happened was, they’d received a report of an
unidentified driver killed near the base in a VW that matched the
description of mine. Until they saw me get off the plane, they
didn’t know if I was alive or dead.
It turned out that Robert LaFond, like a lot of other guys, had
gotten drunk and passed out at the Christmas party. People who
were there told me that some of the officers and noncoms had
carried him out to my car, put him in with the key in the
ignition, and when he came to, he tried to drive off the base. It
was snowing and freezing out; he hit a station wagon head-on
with a military mother and her children inside. ank God, they
weren’t hurt, but in my flimsy car, Robert went into the steering
wheel, through the windshield, and was killed.
is haunted me. We were very close and I was plagued by
the thought that this might not have happened if he hadn’t lent
me the good car. When I got back to base, I had to claim his
personal effects, box up all his possessions, and ship them off to
his family. I kept going back to look at my wrecked car, I kept
having dreams about Robert and the crash. I was with him the
day he’d bought a Christmas present for his parents in Pensacola,
Florida, a gift that arrived in the mail the same day Air Force
officers came to the house to tell them their son had died.
But I wasn’t only grief-stricken, I was also angry as hell. Like
the investigator I later became, I kept asking around until I’d
narrowed it down to the two men I thought were responsible. I
found them in their office, grabbed them, and put them up
against the wall. I started hammering on them, one by one. I had
to be pulled off them. I was so mad, I didn’t care if I got courtmartialed. As far as I was concerned, they had killed my best
friend.
A court-martial would have been a messy affair, since they
would have had to deal with my formal accusation against the
two men. Also, by this time, American involvement in Vietnam
was beginning to wind down, and they were offering early outs
to enlisted men with only a few months to go. So to smooth
things out as best they could, the personnel people discharged
me several months early.
While I was still in the service, I’d finished my undergraduate
degree and begun a master’s in industrial psychology. Now I was
living on the GI Bill in a $7-a-week, windowless, basement
apartment in Clovis, fighting the legions of three-inch waterbugs
that went into attack formation every time I came in and
switched on the lights. Not having access to the base facilities
anymore, I joined a cheap, run-down health club whose
atmosphere and decor roughly matched that of my apartment.
During the fall of 1970, I met a guy at the club named Frank
Haines, who turned out to be an FBI agent. He ran a one-man
resident agency in Clovis. We got friendly while working out
together. It turned out he had heard about me through the
retired base commander and started trying to interest me in
applying to the Bureau. Frankly, I’d never given a single serious
thought to law enforcement. I was planning a career in industrial
psychology once I finished my degree. Working for a large
company, dealing with such issues as personnel matters,
employee assistance, and stress management, seemed to offer a
solid, predictable future. e only direct contact I’d had with the
FBI up until then was one time back in Montana when a trunk
I’d shipped home had been stolen. One of the local field agents
interviewed me, thinking I might have set up the crime to collect
on the insurance. But nothing came of it, and if that was the
kind of cases the FBI handled, there didn’t seem to me to be
much to the job.
But Frank was persistent in thinking I would make a good
special agent and kept encouraging me. He invited me to his
house for dinner several times, introduced me to his wife and
son, showed me both his gun and his paycheck stub, neither of
which I could match. I had to admit, next to my shabby lifestyle,
Frank was living like a king. So I decided to take a crack at it.
Frank stayed in New Mexico, and years later, our paths would
cross when I came out to testify in the trial for a homicide he’d
worked in which a woman was brutally killed and her body
burned to avoid detection. But in the fall of 1970, this kind of
action was far from my mind.
Frank sent my application to the field office in Albuquerque.
ey gave me the standard law test for nonlawyers. Despite my
physical conditioning and muscular build, my 220 pounds was
25 over the FBI limit for my six-foot-two-inch height. e only
one in the Bureau who could exceed the weight standards was the
legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, himself. I spent two weeks
on nothing but Knox gelatin and hard-boiled eggs to get down to
the weight. It also took three haircuts before I was deemed
presentable for an ID photo.
But finally, in November, I was offered a probationary
appointment, at an initial salary of $10,869. Finally, I was
getting out of my depressing, windowless basement room. I
wonder what I would have thought at the time had I known I’d
be spending a major part of my Bureau career in another
windowless basement room, pursuing far more depressing stories.
3
Betting on Raindrops
Many apply, few are chosen.
at was the message continually drummed into us as new
recruits. Nearly everyone interested in a career in law
enforcement aspired to become a special agent of the United
States Federal Bureau of Investigation, but only the very best
could hope to have that opportunity. A long, proud heritage
went all the way back to 1924 when an obscure government
lawyer named John Edgar Hoover took over a corrupt,
underfunded, and badly managed agency. And the same Mr.
Hoover—by the time I joined, seventy-five years of age—still
presided over the revered organization it had become, ruling as
always with a square jaw and an iron fist. So we’d better not let
the Bureau down.
A telegram from the director instructed me to report to Room
625 in the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in
Washington at 9 A.M. on December 14, 1970, to begin the
fourteen weeks of training that would transform me from an
ordinary citizen into a special agent of the FBI. Before this I went
home to Long Island, where my dad was so proud, he flew the
American flag in front of the house. With what I’d been doing
the last several years, I didn’t have any dress-up civilian clothes,
so my dad bought me three “regulation” dark suits—a blue, a
black, and a brown—white shirts, and two pairs of wing tips, one
black and one brown. en he drove me down to Washington to
make sure I’d be on time for my first day of work.
It didn’t take long to become inculcated with FBI ritual and
lore. e special agent leading our induction ceremony told us to
take out our gold badges and stare at them as we recited the oath
of office. We all spoke in unison, staring at the blindfolded
woman holding the scales of justice while solemnly swearing to
support and defend the Constitution of the United States against
all enemies, foreign and domestic. “Bring it closer! Closer!” the
special agent ordered, until we were all staring at these badges
cross-eyed.
My new-agent class was made up solely of white men. In
1970, there were few black FBI agents and no women. at
wouldn’t really open up until after Hoover’s long tenure, and
even from beyond the grave he continued to exert a ghostly and
powerful influence. Most of the men were between twenty-nine
and thirty-five, so at twenty-five, I was one of the youngest.
We were indoctrinated to be on the lookout for Soviet agents,
who would try to compromise us and get our secrets. ese
agents could be anywhere. We were told particularly to beware of
women! e brainwashing was so effective I turned down a date
with an extremely good-looking woman who worked in the
building who had actually asked me out to dinner. I was afraid it
was a setup and I was being tested.
e FBI Academy on the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia,
wasn’t fully built and operational yet, so we took our firearms
and physical training there and the classroom work in the Old
Post Office Building in Washington.
One of the first things every trainee is taught is that an FBI
agent only shoots to kill. e thinking that went into this policy
is both rigorous and logical: if you draw your weapon, you have
already made the decision to shoot. And if you have made the
decision that the situation is serious enough to warrant shooting,
you have decided it is serious enough to take a life. In the heat of
the moment, you seldom have the latitude to plan your shot or
time to indulge in a lot of mental gymnastics, and attempting
merely to stop a subject or bring him down is too risky. You do
not take any unnecessary chances for yourself or a potential
victim.
We were given equally rigorous training in criminal law,
fingerprint analysis, violent and white-collar crime, arrest
techniques, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and the history of
the Bureau’s role in national law enforcement. One of the units I
remember best, though, came fairly early in the course of study.
We all referred to it as “dirty-words training.”
“Doors closed?” the instructor asked. He then handed each of
us a list. “I want you to study these words.” e list, as I recall,
contained such gems of Anglo-Saxon usage as shit, fuck,
cunnilingus, fellatio, cunt, and dickhead. What we were supposed
to do was commit these words to memory so that if they ever
came up in field usage—such as during the interrogation of a
suspect—we’d know what to do. And what we were supposed to
do was to make sure any case report containing any of these
words was given to the office’s “obscene steno”—I’m not kidding!
—rather than the regular secretary. e obscene steno would
traditionally be an older, more mature and seasoned woman,
better able to handle the shock of seeing these words and phrases.
Remember, this was all men in those days, and in 1970 the
national sensibility was somewhat different from what it is today,
at least within Hoover’s FBI. We were actually given a spelling
test on these words, after which the papers were collected and—I
presume—graded before being burned in the metal trash can.
Despite this kind of silliness, we were all idealistic about
fighting crime, and we all thought we could make a difference.
About halfway through new-agent training, I was called in to the
office of the assistant director for training, Joe Casper, one of
Hoover’s trusted lieutenants. People in the Bureau called him the
Friendly Ghost, but the nickname was definitely used ironically
rather than affectionately. Casper told me I was doing well in
most areas, but that I was way below average in “Bureau
communications,” the methodology and nomenclature through
which the diverse elements of the organization communicate
with each other.
“Well, sir, I want to be the best,” I responded. Guys this eager
were described as having blue flames coming out of their asses.
is could help you get ahead, but also made you a marked man.
If a blue-flamer succeeded, he was headed for the top of the
world. But if he screwed up, the crash and burn would be very
long and very public.
Casper may have been tough but he was nobody’s fool, and
he’d seen many a blue-flamer in his time. “You want to be the
best? Here!” whereupon he threw the entire manual of terms at
me and told me to have them all memorized by the time I got
back from the Christmas break.
Chuck Lundsford, one of our class’s two Academy counselors,
got the word on what had happened and came over to me.
“What did you say when you went in there?” he asked me. I told
him. Chuck just rolled his eyes. We both knew I had my work
cut out for me.
I went home to my parents’ house for the holidays. While the
rest of the family was making merry, I had my nose buried deep
in the manual of communications. It wasn’t much of a vacation.
When I got back to Washington in early January, still
sweating out the consequences of my blue-flame performance, I
had to take a written test of what I’d learned. I can’t express how
relieved I was when our other counselor, Charlie Price, told me
I’d scored a 99 percent. “You actually scored a hundred,” Charlie
confided to me, “but Mr. Hoover says no one’s perfect.”
About halfway through the fourteen-week program we were
each asked our preference for a first field-office assignment. Most
of the FBI was dispersed among fifty-nine field offices around the
country. I sensed there must be some gamesmanship in the
choosing—a giant chess match between the new recruits and
headquarters—and as always, I tried to think like the other side.
I was from New York and had no particular interest in going
back there. I figured L.A., San Francisco, Miami, possibly Seattle
and San Diego, would be the most sought-after postings. So if I
selected a second-tier city, I’d be much more likely to get my first
choice.
I chose Atlanta. I got Detroit.
Upon graduation, we were all given permanent credentials, a
Smith & Wesson Model 10 six-shot .38 revolver, six bullets, and
instructions to get out of town as fast as possible. Headquarters
was always terrified that the raw new agents would get in trouble
in Washington, right under Mr. Hoover’s nose, which would
reflect badly on everyone.
e other item I was given was a booklet entitled “Survival
Guide to Detroit.” e city was among the most racially
polarized in the country, still reeling from the repercussions of
the 1967 riots, and could claim the title of the nation’s crime
capital, with more than eight hundred murders a year. In fact, we
had a gruesome pool in the office, betting on exactly how many
homicides would be chalked up by year’s end. Like most new
agents, I started out idealistic and energetic, but soon realized
what we were up against. I had spent four years in the Air Force,
but the closest to combat I’d been was in a bed in the base
hospital next to wounded Vietnam vets when I had my nose
operated on for football and boxing injuries. So until I got to
Detroit, I’d never been in the position of being the enemy. e
FBI was hated in many quarters; they’d infiltrated college
campuses and had set up networks of urban informers. With our
somber black cars, we were marked men. In many
neighborhoods, people threw rocks at us. eir German
shepherds and Dobermans didn’t like us much, either. We were
told not to find ourselves in some sections of the city without
extremely heavy backup and firepower.
Local police were angry at us, too. ey accused the Bureau of
“scooping” cases, putting out press releases before a case was
complete, then adding police-solved crimes to the FBI’s own
clearance-rate stats. Ironically, around the time of my rookie year,
1971, about a thousand new agents were hired, and the bulk of
our practical street training came not from the Bureau but from
local cops who took us under their protective wings. Much of the
success of my generation of special agents unquestionably is
attributable to the professionalism and generosity of police
officers all over the United States.
Bank robberies were particularly prevalent. On Fridays, when
the banks stocked up with cash to handle paydays, we averaged
two or three armed robberies, sometimes as many as five. Until
bullet-resistant glass became commonplace in Detroit banks, the
murder and wounding of tellers was appalling. We had a case
captured on a bank surveillance camera in which a manager was
shot and killed at his desk, execution style, while a terrified
couple sitting across from him, applying for a loan, looked on
helplessly. e robber was unhappy that the manager couldn’t
open the timed vault. And it wasn’t just bank officials with access
to tens of thousands of dollars in cash. In certain neighborhoods,
workers at places like McDonald’s were equally at risk.
I was assigned to the Reactive Crimes Unit, which meant, in
effect, reacting to crimes that had already happened, bank
robbery or extortion, for example. Within that unit, I worked
with the UFAP Squad: Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution.
is turned out to be excellent experience because this squad
always saw a lot of action. In addition to the office-wide yearly
homicide pool, we ran a contest in the unit to see who could
make the most arrests in a single day. It was just like the
competitions car dealers run for who can make the most sales in
a given time.
One of our busiest lines of work in those days was what was
referred to as the 42 Classification: military deserters. Vietnam
had ripped the country in two, and once most of these guys went
absent from the service, they did not want in the worst way to go
back. We had more assaults against law officers registered with 42
Classifications than with any other type of fugitive.
My first encounter with a UFAP came when I’d tracked an
Army deserter to the service garage where he worked. I identify
myself and think he’s going to come along quietly. en
suddenly, he pulls this filed-down, makeshift knife with a blacktape handle on me. I pull back, just narrowly avoiding getting
stabbed. I lunge at him, throw him up against the glass garage
door, then force him down on the ground with a knee on his
back and my gun up to his head. Meanwhile, the manager is
raising hell with me for taking away a good worker. What the hell
have I gotten myself into? Was this really the career I’d envisioned?
Was it worth continually risking my hide to bring in this kind of
lowlife? Industrial psychology was looking awfully good.
Going after deserters often brought with it emotional turmoil
as well as creating resentment between the military and the FBI.
Sometimes we’d follow up on an arrest warrant, locate the guy,
and grab him right on the street. Infuriated, he would stop us,
rap with his knuckles on an artificial leg, and tell us he’d gotten a
Purple Heart and a Silver Star for that in Nam. What was
happening over and over was that deserters who either returned
voluntarily or were picked up by the Army itself were routinely
sent over to Vietnam as punishment. Many of these guys
subsequently distinguished themselves in combat, but the
military hadn’t told us anything. So as far as we knew, they were
still AWOL. is aggravated the hell out of us.
Worse yet was when we’d go to a deserter’s listed residence and
be told by tearful and rightfully enraged wives or parents that the
subject had died a hero’s death. We’d be chasing down dead men,
killed in action, and the military never got around to letting us
know.
Regardless of the profession you’re in, when you get out into
the field, you start realizing all the big and little things they never
taught you in school or training. For one, what do you do with
your gun in various situations, such as while using a public men’s
room stall? Do you leave it on your belt down on the floor? Do
you try to hang it up on the stall door? For a while I tried
holding it in my lap, but that made me very nervous. It’s the
kind of thing each of us faces, but not the kind of thing you feel
comfortable discussing with your more experienced colleagues.
By the time I’d been on the job a month, it became a problem.
When I moved to Detroit, I’d bought another Volkswagen
Beetle, the same kind of car, ironically, that was becoming the
serial killer vehicle of choice. Ted Bundy had one and it was one
of the ways he was ultimately identified. Anyway, I’d stopped in a
local shopping center to go into a men’s store to buy a suit.
Knowing I’m going to be trying on clothes, I figure I’d better
leave my gun someplace safe. So I stick it in the glove
compartment and head into the store.
Now, the VW Beetle had a couple of interesting
characteristics. Since it was a rear-engine car, the spare tire was
stored in the trunk in front. Since it was practically ubiquitous in
those days—not to mention easy to break into—spare tires were
an extremely common theft item. After all, just about everyone
needed one. And last but not least, the trunk was opened
through a switch in the glove compartment.
I’m sure you can guess the rest. I come out to the car and find
the window broken. As I reconstruct this highly sophisticated
crime, the tire thief breaks into the car, goes in the glove
compartment to open the trunk for the tire, but sees there a
much greater prize. I deduce this because my gun is gone but the
tire’s still there.
“Oh, shit!” I’m saying to myself. “I’ve been on the job less
than thirty days and I’m already supplying weapons to the
enemy!” And I know that losing your gun or your credentials
means an instant letter of censure. So I go to my squad
supervisor, Bob Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick’s a big guy, a real father
figure. He dresses dapper and is something of a living legend in
the Bureau. He knows my ass is on the line and how bad I feel.
e gun loss has to be reported to the Director’s Office, which is
just great since that’ll be the first field entry in my personnel file.
He says we’ve got to come up with something really creative,
revolving around how I’m so concerned with maintaining the
public peace that I didn’t want to take the chance of alarming
anyone in the store if they suddenly saw a gun and thought they
were being robbed. Fitzpatrick reassures me that since I’m not up
for promotion for a couple of years, the letter of censure
shouldn’t hurt me as long as I keep my nose clean from now on.
So that’s what I tried to do, though that gun continued to
haunt me for a long time. e Smith & Wesson Model 10 I
turned in to the Quantico armory almost twenty-five years later
when I retired from the Bureau was actually the replacement of
my original weapon. ank God, that first gun never turned up
in a crime. In fact, it essentially disappeared.
•••
I lived with two other single agents, Bob McGonigel and Jack
Kunst, in a furnished town house in Taylor, Michigan, a
southern suburb of Detroit. We were great friends and Bob
would later be best man at my wedding. He was also a maniac.
He would wear crushed-velvet suits and lavender shirts, even
during inspections. He seemed to be the only one in the entire
FBI who wasn’t afraid of Hoover. Later, Bob went into
undercover work where he wouldn’t have to wear a suit at all.
He had started out in the Bureau as a clerk, taking the “inside
route” to become a special agent. Some of the best people in the
FBI began as clerks, including several I selected for the
Investigative Support Unit. But in certain circles, former clerks
were resented, as if they’d had special preference to become
agents.
Bob was the greatest I have ever known at “pretext calls.” is
was a proactive technique we developed to catch offenders,
particularly useful when the element of surprise was paramount.
Bob was an artist with accents. If the suspect was in the mob,
he’d do an Italian accent. For the Black Panthers, he could pass as
a street dude. He also had a Nation of Islam persona, an Irish
brogue, immigrant Jew, Grosse Pointe WASP. Not only did he
have the voices down cold, he would alter the vocabulary and
diction to suit the character. Bob was so good at this that he once
called Joe Del Campo—another agent you’ll read about in the
next chapter—and convinced Joe he was a black militant who
wanted to turn FBI informant. In those days, there was a lot of
pressure to develop inner-city sources. Bob sets up a meeting
with Joe, who thinks he’s onto something big. No one shows up
for Joe’s meeting, and the next day in the office he’s really pissed
off when Bob greets him with the pretext voice!
•••
Arresting the bad guys was one thing, but soon I found myself
becoming interested in the thought processes that went into the
crime. Whenever I would arrest someone, I’d ask him questions,
such as why he chose one bank over another or what made him
select this particular victim. We all knew that robbers preferred
to hit banks on Friday afternoons because that was when the
most money would be on the premises. But beyond that, I
wanted to know what decisions went into the planning and
execution of the hit?
I must not have seemed very intimidating. Just as they had in
school, people felt comfortable opening up to me. e more I
questioned these guys, the more I came to understand that the
successful criminals were good profilers. ey each had a
carefully thought through and well-researched profile of the type
of bank they preferred. Some liked banks near major
thoroughfares or interstates so that getaways would be easier and
they could be many miles away before a pursuit could be
organized. Some liked small, isolated branches, such as the
temporary ones set up in trailers. Many would case a bank ahead
of time to get the layout down, to find out how many people
worked there and how many customers could be expected in the
lobby at any given time. Sometimes they would keep visiting
bank branches until they found one where no males worked, and
that would become the target. Buildings with no windows out to
the street were best, since no one on the outside could witness
the robbery in progress and witnesses on the inside would be
unable to identify the getaway car. e best practitioners had
come to the conclusion that a holdup note was better than a
public announcement, waving a gun, and they’d always
remember to take the note back before they left so as not to leave
evidence. e best getaway car was a stolen one, and the best
scenario of all was to have the car parked ahead of time so that it
isn’t noticed pulling up. You walk up to the bank, then drive
away after the job. A robber who’d been particularly successful at
a particular bank might watch it for a while, and if conditions
remained the same, he’d hit the same one again within a couple
of months.
Of all public facilities, banks are about the best set up to deal
with robbery. Yet I was continually amazed when I did follow-up
investigations at how many would have neglected to load film in
the surveillance cameras, how many had set off a silent alarm
accidentally and then forgotten to reset it, or tripped it so often
that the police would respond slowly because they figured it was
just another accident. is was like hanging out a Rob Me! sign
to a sophisticated criminal.
But if you started profiling the cases—I hadn’t attached this
term to the process yet—you could begin seeing patterns. And
once you began seeing patterns, you could start taking proactive
measures to catch the bad guys. For example, if you started to see
that a rash of bank robberies all seemed to fit together, and if
you’d talked to enough perpetrators to understand what it was in
each of these jobs that appealed to them, you could obviously
and heavily fortify all the bank offices that met the criteria except
for one. is one, of course, would be under constant police
and/or FBI surveillance with plainclothes details inside. In effect,
you could force the robber to select the bank of your choosing
and be ready for him when he did. When this kind of proactive
tactic was employed, bank-robbery clearance rates went way up.
Whatever we did in those days, we did under the looming
presence of J. Edgar Hoover, just as our predecessors had since
1924. In this age of musical-chairs appointments and trial by
public opinion, it’s difficult to convey the degree of power and
control Hoover exercised, not only over the FBI, but government
leaders, the media, and the public at large. If you wanted to write
a book or a script about the Bureau, such as Don Whitehead’s
huge 1950s bestseller e FBI Story, or the popular James Stewart
movie based on it, or produce a TV series, such as Efrem
Zimbalist Jr.’s e FBI of the 1960s, you had to have Mr.
Hoover’s personal approval and blessing. Likewise, if you were a
high government official, you would always have that nagging
fear that the director “had something” on you, particularly if he
called in friendly tones to let you know the FBI had “uncovered”
a nasty rumor that he would do everything he could to make sure
never became damagingly public.
Nowhere was Mr. Hoover’s personal mystique stronger than
in the FBI branch offices and among the Bureau’s management.
It was an accepted fact that the FBI held the prestige and
admiration it did because of him. He had almost single-handedly
built the agency into what it was, and he was tireless in his fights
for budget increases and pay raises. He was both revered and
feared, and if you didn’t think much of him, you kept it to
yourself. Discipline was fierce, and branch inspections were
bloodbaths. If the inspectors didn’t find enough things that
needed improvement, Hoover might suspect they weren’t doing
their jobs exhaustively enough, which meant they would require
a certain number of letters of censure from each inspection,
whether the conditions warranted them or not. It was like a
quota for issuing traffic tickets. It got so bad that special agents in
charge, known as SACs, would find sacrificial lambs who weren’t
immediately up for promotion so that letters of censure wouldn’t
hurt their careers.
One time, in a story that no longer has a very humorous ring
after the horrific 1995 bombing of the federal building in
Oklahoma City, a bomb threat to the FBI office was called in
after an inspection. e call was traced to a phone booth just
outside the federal building downtown where the field office was
located. Authorities from headquarters came in and removed the
entire phone booth and wanted to compare the fingerprints on
the coins in the phone box with those of all 350 individuals in
the office. Fortunately for all of us, reason prevailed and the
examination never took place. But that was an example of the
tension Mr. Hoover’s policies could cause.
ere were standard operating procedures for everything.
ough I never had the opportunity to meet Mr. Hoover in a
one-on-one setting, I did (and still do) have a personally
autographed photo of him in my office. ere was even a
standard procedure for getting such a photo as a young agent.
e SAC would tell you to have his secretary write a kiss-ass
letter for you, elaborating on how proud you were to be an FBI
special agent and how much you admired Mr. Hoover. If you’d
written your letter properly, you’d receive a photo with best
wishes to you as a sign for all to see of your personal connection
to the leader.
Certain other procedures, we never knew for sure where they
came from, whether they were Hoover’s personal directives or
merely an overzealous interpretation of the director’s wishes.
Everyone in the office was expected to put in overtime, and
everyone was supposed to be above the office average. I’m sure
you see the dilemma. Month by month, like some crazy pyramid
scheme, the hours would keep growing. Agents who came into
the Bureau with the highest morals and character would be
forced to learn to inflate their time sheets. ere was to be no
smoking or coffee drinking in the office. And like a force of
door-to-door salesmen, agents were discouraged from hanging
around the office at all, even to use the telephone. erefore,
each man developed his own work habits to get around this. I
spent a lot of time going over my cases at a carrel at the public
library,
One of the greatest adherents to the Gospel According to
Saint Edgar was our SAC, Neil Welch, nicknamed the Grape.
Welch was a big guy, about six four, with heavy horn-rim glasses.
He was stern and stoic, not at all warm and fuzzy. He enjoyed a
distinguished career in the Bureau, going on to head field offices
in Philadelphia and New York, among others. ere was some
talk he would take Hoover’s place when (or should I say, if ) the
inevitable day finally arrived. In New York, Welch formed a
group that was the first to effectively use the federal RICO
conspiracy statutes (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations) against organized crime. But back in Detroit, he
went by the book.
Naturally and inevitably, Welch and Bob McGonigel would
clash, and it happened one Saturday when we were at home. Bob
got a call that the Grape wanted to see him immediately, along
with our squad supervisor, Bob Fitzpatrick. So McGonigel goes
in, and Welch tells him someone’s been using the phone to call
New Jersey. It’s against the rules to use the phone for personal
business. Actually, what he’d been doing could have been
interpreted either way, but in the FBI, you erred on the side of
caution.
Welch, who could be really fierce, starts out generally, using
good interrogation techniques that put the subject on the spot.
“Okay, McGonigel, what about those telephone calls?”
So Bob starts confessing to any call he can think of because
he’s afraid Welch might have something more serious on him and
maybe he can satisfy the SAC’s wrath by giving him the petty
stuff.
Welch rises to his full imposing height, leans over his desk,
and points his finger menacingly. “McGonigel, let me tell you
something: you’ve got two strikes against you. First, you’re a
former clerk. I hate fucking clerks! e second thing is, if I ever
see you wearing a lavender-colored shirt, particularly during
inspection, I’m gonna kick your ass up and down East Jefferson.
And if I ever see you near a telephone, I’m gonna throw your ass
down the elevator shaft. Now get out of my office!”
Bob comes home a beaten man, convinced he’s going to be
fired. Jack Kunst and I really feel sorry for him. But what
Fitzpatrick tells me the next day is that after McGonigel left, he
and Welch sat there laughing their asses off.
Years later, when I headed up the Investigative Support Unit, I
would get asked if—with all that we knew about criminal
behavior and crime-scene analysis—any of us could commit the
perfect murder. I always told them no, that even with all we
knew, our postoffense behavior would still give us away. I think
the incident between McGonigel and Welch proves that even a
first-rate FBI agent isn’t immune to the pressures of the right
interrogator.
By the way, from the moment he left the SAC’s office that
Saturday afternoon, Bob wore the whitest shirts in town . . . until
Neil Welch was transferred to Philadelphia.
Much of Hoover’s leverage in getting his funding requests
through Congress had to do with the statistics he could throw
around. But for the director to be able to use these numbers,
everyone in the field had to deliver.
Early in 1972, so the story goes, Welch promised the boss 150
gambling arrests. at, apparently, was the category needing a
boost in numbers at the time. So we set up an elaborate sting
with informants, wiretaps, and military-like planning, all to
culminate on Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest illegal-gambling
day of the year. e Dallas Cowboys, who’d lost a close contest to
the Baltimore Colts the year before, were playing the Miami
Dolphins in New Orleans.
Arrests of bookies have to be lightning-fast, precision
procedures because they use flash paper (which burns instantly)
or potato paper (which is water soluble). e operation promised
to be something of a mess because there had been intermittent
showers all day.
Our sting netted more than two hundred gamblers on that
rainy afternoon. At one point, I had a subject handcuffed in the
back of the car, bringing him back to the armory where we were
booking them all. He was a charming guy, friendly. He was
handsome, too; looked like Paul Newman. He said to me,
“Sometime when this is all over, we ought to get together for
some racquetball.”
He was approachable enough, so I started asking him
questions, just the way I’d been asking bank robbers. “Why do
you do this stuff?”
“I love it,” he replied. “You can arrest all of us today, John. It
won’t make a bit of difference.”
“But for a smart guy like you, making money legitimately
should be easy.”
He shook his head, like I still didn’t get it. It was raining
harder now. He glanced to the side, directing my attention to the
car’s window. “You see those two raindrops?” He pointed. “I’ll
bet you the one on the left will get to the bottom of the glass
before the one on the right does. We don’t need the Super Bowl.
All we need is two little raindrops. You can’t stop us, John, no
matter what you do. It’s what we are.”
For me, this brief encounter was like a bolt out of the blue,
like an instant cessation of ignorance. It may seem naive in
retrospect, but suddenly, everything I’d been asking, all of my
research with bank robbers and other criminals, came crystal
clear.
It’s what we are.
ere was something inherent, deep within the criminal’s
mind and psyche, that compelled him to do things in a certain
way. Later, when I started research into the minds and
motivations of serial murderers, then, when I began analyzing
crime scenes for behavioral clues, I would look for the one
element or set of elements that made the crime and the criminal
stand out, that represented what he was.
Eventually, I would come up with the term signature to
describe this unique element and personal compulsion, which
remained static. And I would use it as distinguishable from the
traditional concept of modus operandi, which is fluid and can
change. is became the core of what we do in the Investigative
Support Unit.
As it turned out, all the hundreds of arrests we made that
Super Bowl Sunday were thrown out of court on technical
procedure. In everyone’s haste to get the operation up and
running, an assistant to the attorney general, rather than the
attorney general himself, had signed the search warrants. But the
SAC Welch had fulfilled his promise and delivered his numbers
to Hoover, at least long enough for them to have the desired
impact on Capitol Hill. And I had come up with an insight that
was to become critical in my law enforcement career, simply by
betting on raindrops.
4
Between Two Worlds
It was a hijacking case involving the interstate theft of a
truckload of J&B Scotch worth about $100,000. It was spring of
1971 and I had been on the job in Detroit going on six months.
e warehouse foreman had tipped us off where they were going
to make the exchange of money for the stolen booze.
We were working it as a joint FBI-Detroit police operation,
but both organizations had met separately for planning. Only the
higher-ups had talked to each other, and whatever they’d decided
hadn’t filtered down to the street. So when the time came to
make the arrest, no one was quite sure what anyone else was
doing.
It’s nighttime, the outskirts of the city, by a set of railroad
tracks. I’m driving one of the FBI cars with my squad supervisor,
Bob Fitzpatrick, in the seat next to me. e informant was
Fitzpatrick’s, and Bob McGonigel was the case agent.
Word comes over the radio, “Bust ’em! Bust ’em!” We all
come screeching to a halt, surrounding this semi. e driver
opens the door, bolts out, and starts running. Along with an
agent in another car, I open the door and get out, pull out my
gun, and start running after him.
It’s dark, we’re all dressed down—no suits or ties or anything
—and I will never ever forget the whites of his eyes as I see a
uniformed cop holding a shotgun aimed directly at me and he’s
yelling, “Halt! Police! Drop the gun!” We’re less than eight feet
from each other, and I realize, this guy’s about to shoot me. I
freeze, at the same time coming to grips with the fact that if I
make one wrong move, I’m history,
I’m about to drop my gun and put up my hands when I hear
Bob Fitzpatrick’s voice frantically shouting, “He’s FBI! He’s an
FBI agent!”
e cop lowers his shotgun, and instinctively I take off again
after the driver, adrenaline pumping, trying to make up the
distance I’ve lost. e other agent and I reach him together. We
tackle him to the ground and cuff him, more roughly than
necessary, I’m so keyed up. But that frozen couple of seconds
when I thought I was going to be blown away was one of the
most terrifying experiences I’ve ever had. Many times since then,
as I’ve tried to put myself in the shoes and heads of rape and
murder victims, as I’ve forced myself to imagine what they must
have been thinking and going through at the moment of attack,
I’ve recalled my own fear, and it’s helped me to really understand
cases from the victim’s point of view.
At the same time that a lot of us younger guys were busting
our humps trying to make as many arrests as we could, many of
the burnt-out old-timers seemed to have the attitude that rocking
the boat was senseless, that you got paid the same whether you
put yourself out on the limb or not, and that initiative was
something for salesmen. Since we were encouraged to spend
most of our time out of the office, window-shopping, sitting in
the park, and reading the Wall Street Journal became favorite
pastimes for a certain segment of the agent force.
Being the blue-flamer that I was, I took it upon myself to
write a memo suggesting a merit pay system to encourage the
people who were being most productive. I gave my memo to our
ASAC, pronounced “a-sack,” or assistant special agent in charge,
Tom Naly.
Tom calls me into his office, closes the door, picks up the
memo from his desk, and smiles benevolently at me. “What are
you worried about, John? You’ll get your GS-11,” he says as he
rips the memo in half.
“You’ll get your GS-12,” he says as he tears it in half again.
“You’ll get your GS-13.” Another rip, and by now, he’s really
laughing. “Don’t rock the boat, Douglas,” is his final advice as he
lets the pieces of the memo flutter into the trash can.
Fifteen years later, long after J. Edgar Hoover was dead and at
least somewhat gone, the FBI did implement a merit pay system.
ough, when they finally got around to it, they obviously
managed it with no help from me.
One evening in May—actually, I remember it was the Friday
after May 17, for reasons that will become clear in a moment—I
was with Bob McGonigel and Jack Kunst in a bar where we used
to hang out, across the street from the office, called Jim’s Garage.
ere’s a rock-and-roll band playing, we’ve all had a few too
many beers, when suddenly this attractive young woman comes
in with a girlfriend. She reminds me of a young Sophia Loren,
dressed in the trendy outfit of the times—this short blue dress
and go-go boots practically up to her groin.
I call out, “Hey, blue! Come on over here!” So, to my surprise,
she and the friend do. Her name is Pam Modica and we start
joking around, hitting it off. Turns out it was her twenty-first
birthday and she and the friend are out celebrating her legal right
to drink. She seems to be into my sense of humor. Later, I find
out her first impression of me was good-looking but kind of
nerdy with my short, government-issue haircut. We leave Jim’s
and spend the rest of the night bar-hopping.
In the next couple of weeks, we got to know each other better.
She lived within the city of Detroit and had gone to Pershing
High, a practically all-black school where basketball great Elvin
Hayes went. When I met her, she was attending Eastern
Michigan University in Ypsilanti.
ings developed pretty quickly between us, although not
without its social costs to Pam. is was 1971, the Vietnam War
was still on, and distrust of the FBI was rampant on college
campuses. Many of her friends didn’t want to associate with us,
convinced I was an establishment plant who was reporting back
on their activities to some higher authority. e entire notion
that these kids were important enough to be spied on was
ludicrous, except that the FBI was doing that sort of thing back
then.
I remember going with Pam to a sociology class. I sat in the
back of the room, listening to the lecturer, a young, radical
assistant professor; very cool, very “with it.” But I kept looking at
the professor and her gaze kept coming back to me, and it was
obvious she was really bothered by my being there. Anyone from
the FBI was the enemy, even if he was the boyfriend of one of her
students. Looking back on the incident, I realized how unsettling
an effect you can sometimes have just by being yourself, and my
unit and I used this to our advantage. In a vicious murder case
up in Alaska, my colleague Jud Ray, who is black, got a racist
defendant to come unglued on the witness stand by sitting next
to and being friendly to the man’s girlfriend.
During Pam’s early college years at Eastern Michigan, a serial
killer was working, though we didn’t yet use that terminology.
He’d struck first in July of 1967, when a young woman named
Mary Fleszar disappeared from the campus. Her decomposed
body was found a month later. She had been stabbed to death
and her hands and feet hacked off. A year later, the body of Joan
Schell, a student at the University of Michigan in nearby Ann
Arbor, was discovered. She’d been raped and stabbed almost fifty
times. en another body was found in Ypsilanti.
e killings, which became known as the “Michigan
Murders,” escalated, and women at both universities lived in
terror. Each body that turned up bore evidence of horrible abuse.
By the time a University of Michigan student named John
Norman Collins was arrested in 1969—almost by chance by his
uncle, state police corporal David Leik—six coeds and one
thirteen-year-old girl had met grisly deaths.
Collins was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment
about three months before I entered the Bureau. But I often
wondered if the Bureau had known then what we do now, if the
monster could have been trapped before he had been responsible
for so much misery. Even after his capture, his specter continued
to haunt both campuses, as Ted Bundy’s would haunt other
colleges only a few years later. With the memory of the hideous
crimes so much a part of Pam’s recent life, they became a part of
mine as well. And I think it’s more than likely, at least on a
subconscious level, that when I began studying, then hunting,
serial killers, John Norman Collins and his beautiful, innocent
victims were very much with me.
I was five years older than Pam, but since she was in college
and I was out in the working world of law enforcement, it often
seemed like a generation gap. In public, she was often quiet and
seemingly passive around me and my friends, and I’m afraid we
sometimes took advantage of this.
One time, Bob McGonigel and I met Pam for lunch at a hotel
restaurant that overlooked the downtown area. We’re both in
dark suits and wing tips, and Pam is in perky coed casual.
Afterward, we’re taking the elevator back down to the lobby, and
it seems like it’s stopping on every floor. Each time, it gets a little
more packed.
About halfway down, Bob turns to Pam and says, “We really
enjoyed ourselves today. Next time we’re in town, we’ll definitely
give you a call.”
Pam is looking down at the floor, trying not to react at all
when I jump in, “And next time, I’ll bring the whipped cream
and you bring the cherries.” e other passengers are all looking
at each other, squirming uncomfortably, until Pam bursts out
laughing. en they look at the three of us like we’re some kind
of perverts.
Pam was scheduled to be an exchange student in Coventry,
England, for the fall semester. By late August, when she flew
over, I was pretty sure she was the girl I wanted to marry. It never
occurred to me at the time to ask Pam if she had similar feelings
about me. I just assumed that she must.
While she was away, we wrote to each other constantly. I
spent a lot of time at her family’s house at 622 Alameda Street,
near the Michigan State Fairgrounds. Pam’s father had died when
she was a little girl, but I took advantage of the hospitality of her
mom, Rosalie, eating there several nights a week and profiling
her, as well as Pam’s brothers and sisters, to try to figure out what
Pam was like.
During this time, I met another woman whom Pam thereafter
referred to (though she had never met her) as the “golf babe.”
Again, we met at a bar, and when I look back on it, I must have
been spending more than my share of time in bars. She was in
her early twenties, quite attractive, and recently out of college.
We’d practically just met when she insists I come home with her
to dinner.
It turns out she lives in Dearborn, which is Ford World
Headquarters, and her father is a major auto executive. ey live
in this big stone house with a swimming pool, original art, fancy
furniture. Her father is in his late forties, the image of corporate
success. Her mother is gracious and elegant. We’re sitting at the
dinner table, flanked by my new friend’s younger brother and
sister. I’m profiling this family, trying to figure out their net
worth. At the same time, they’re trying to assess me.
Everything is going too well. ey seem impressed that I’m an
FBI agent, a welcome change from what I’m used to from Pam’s
circle. But, of course, these people are as establishment as they
come. I’m really getting nervous, and I realize the reason is that
they’ve practically got me married off.
e father is asking me about my family, my background, my
military service. I tell him about my job running Air Force base
athletic facilities. en he tells me that he and an associate own a
golf course near Detroit. He goes on about this fairway and that
dogleg and I’m upping my estimate of his assets by the second.
“John, do you play golf?” he asks.
“No, Dad,” I respond without missing a beat, “but I’d sure
like to learn.”
at was it. We all break up. I spent the night there, on the
couch in the den. In the middle of the night I was visited by the
girl, who had somehow managed to “sleepwalk” down to see me.
Maybe it was the idea of being in this fancy house, maybe it was
my instinctive fear since I’d joined the Bureau of being set up,
but I was scared off by her aggressiveness, which matched that of
the rest of her family. I left the next morning, having enjoyed
their hospitality and a terrific dinner. But I knew I’d lost my shot
at the good life.
Pam came home from England a couple of days before
Christmas, 1971. I had decided to pop the question and had
bought a diamond engagement ring. In those days, the Bureau
had contacts for just about anything you wanted to buy. e
company from whom I bought the ring was grateful to us for
cracking a jewelry heist and gave excellent deals to agents.
With this preferred price, the biggest diamond ring I could
afford was 1.25 carats. But I decided if she first saw it at the
bottom of a champagne glass, not only would she think I was
exceedingly clever, it would also make the diamond look as if it
were three carats. I took her to an Italian restaurant on Eight
Mile Road near her house. My intention was that whenever she
got up to go to the ladies’ room, I’d drop the ring into her glass.
But she never went. So the next night, I took her to the same
restaurant again, but with the same results. Having sat on
numerous stakeouts by that time, where sitting in a car for hours
on end and having to hold it in was a genuine occupational
drawback, I really had to admire her. But maybe this was
supposed to be some sort of divine message that I wasn’t ready to
jump into marriage.
e next night was Christmas Eve and we were at her
mother’s house, with the entire family crowded around. is was
my now-or-never moment. We’d been drinking Asti Spumante,
which she loved. Finally, she left the room for a minute to go
into the kitchen. When she came back, she was sitting in my lap,
we drank a toast, and if I hadn’t stopped her, she would have
swallowed the ring. So much for looking like three carats; she
never even saw it until I pointed it out. I wondered if there was a
message here.
e important thing, though, was that I had set up my
“interrogation scene” to obtain the intended result. Having
staged the scene so carefully, surrounding us with her siblings
and her mother, who adored me, I hadn’t left Pam many options.
She said yes. We would be married the following June.
•••
For their second-year assignments, most of the single agents were
being sent to New York or Chicago, under the logic that it would
be less of a hardship for them than the married guys. I didn’t
have any particular preference and ended up assigned to
Milwaukee, which sounded like an okay city even though I’d
never been there and had no real idea where it was. I would move
there in January and get settled in, then Pam would join me after
the wedding.
I found a place in the Juneau Village Apartments, on Juneau
Avenue, not too far from the Milwaukee Field Office in the
federal building on North Jackson Street. is turned out to be a
tactical mistake, because whatever happened, the response was
always, “Go get Douglas. He’s only three blocks away.”
Even before I arrived in Milwaukee, the women in the office
knew who I was: specifically, one of only two single agents. In
my first few weeks they fought to take my dictation, even though
I had little to do. Everyone wanted to be around me. But after a
few weeks, when word gradually got around that I was engaged, I
quickly became like the sixth day of a five-day deodorant.
e atmosphere in the Milwaukee Field Office turned out to
be a replay of Detroit, only more so. My first SAC there was a
man named Ed Hays, whom everyone called Fast Eddie. He was
always red as a beet (and dropped dead from high blood pressure
shortly after his retirement), and was always walking around
snapping his fingers and shouting, “Get out of the office! Get out
of the office!”
I said, “Where am I supposed to go? I just got here. I don’t
have a car. I don’t have any cases.”
He shot back, “I don’t care where you go. Get out of the
office.”
So I left. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon to go into a
library or walk down Wisconsin Avenue near the office and find
several agents window-shopping because they had nowhere else
to be. It was during this time that I bought my next car, a Ford
Torino, through a car dealer with whom the Bureau had
contacts.
Our next SAC, Herb Hoxie, was brought in from the Little
Rock, Arkansas, Field Office. Recruiting was always a big issue
for SACs, and as soon as Hoxie arrived, he was already under the
gun. Each field office had a monthly quota for both agents and
nonclerical personnel.
Hoxie called me into his office and told me I was to be in
charge of recruiting. is assignment generally went to a single
guy because it involved a lot of traveling around the state.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because we had to take the last guy off and he’s lucky not to
be fired.” He’d been going into the local high schools and
interviewing the girls for clerical positions. Hoover was still alive
and there were no female special agents in those days. He would
ask them questions, as if from a prepared list. One of them was,
“Are you a virgin?” If she answered no, he’d ask her out on a date.
Parents started complaining and the SAC had to slam-dunk him.
I started recruiting all over the state. Soon, I was bringing in
almost four times the quota. I was the most productive recruiter
in the country. e problem was, I was too good. ey wouldn’t
take me off. When I told Herb I really didn’t want to do it
anymore, that I hadn’t joined the FBI to do personnel, he
threatened to put me on the civil rights detail, which meant
investigating police departments and officers accused of
brutalizing suspects and prisoners or of discrimination against
minorities. is was not exactly the most popular job in the
Bureau, either. I thought this was a hell of a way to reward me
for my good work.
So I cut myself a deal. Cockily, I agreed to continue
producing the big recruiting numbers if Hoxie would assign me
as his primary relief, or substitute, and if I got the use of a
Bureau car and a recommendation for Law Enforcement
Assistance Administration (LEAA) money for graduate school. I
knew that if I didn’t want to spend my entire career out in the
field, I needed a master’s degree.
I was already somewhat suspect in the office. Anyone who
wanted this much education must be a flaming liberal. At the
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where I began pursuing a
master’s in educational psychology nights and weekends, I was
perceived as just the opposite. Most of the professors were
suspicious of having an FBI agent in their classes, and I never
had much patience with all the touchy-feely stuff that was so
much a part of psychology (“John, I want you to introduce
yourself to your neighbor here and tell him what John Douglas is
really like”).
One class, we were all sitting around in a circle. Circles were
big in those days. It gradually dawns on me that no one is talking
to me. I try to become part of the conversation, but no one will
say anything. Finally, I just said, “What is the problem here,
folks?” It turns out I have a metal-handled comb sticking out of
my jacket pocket and they all think it’s an antenna—that I’m
recording the class and transmitting it back to “headquarters.”
e paranoid self-importance of these people never ceased to
amaze me.
At the beginning of May 1972, J. Edgar Hoover died quietly
in his sleep, at home in Washington. Early in the morning,
Teletype messages flew from headquarters to every field office. In
Milwaukee, we were all called in by the SAC to hear the news.
Even though Hoover was in his late seventies and had been
around forever, no one really thought he’d ever die. With the
king now dead, we all wondered where a new king was going to
come from to take his place. L. Patrick Gray, a deputy attorney
general and Nixon loyalist, was appointed acting director. He was
popular at first for such innovations as finally allowing female
agents. It wasn’t until his administration loyalties began to
conflict with the needs of the Bureau that he began to slip.
I was recruiting in Green Bay a few weeks after Hoover’s death
when I get a call from Pam. She tells me the priest wants to meet
with us a few days before the wedding. I’m convinced he thinks
he can convert me to Catholicism and score some points with the
Church brass. But Pam is a good Catholic who’s been brought up
to respect and obey what the priests tell her. And I know she’ll
badger the hell out of me if I don’t surrender peacefully.
We come to St. Rita’s Church together, only she goes in to see
the priest by herself first. It reminds me of the police station back
when I was in college in Montana, when they separated all of us
to check our stories. I’m sure they’re planning the conversion
strategy. When they finally call me in, the first thing I say is,
“What do you two have in store for the Protestant kid?”
e priest is young and friendly, probably in his early thirties.
He asks me these general questions, such as “What is love?” I’m
trying to profile him, trying to figure out if there’s a particular
right answer. ese interviews are like the SATs; you’re never sure
if you’ve prepared properly.
We get into birth control, how the kids are going to be raised,
that sort of thing. I start asking him how he feels about being a
priest—being celibate, not having his own family. e priest
seems like a nice guy, but Pam has told me St. Rita’s is a strict,
traditional church and he’s uncomfortable around me, maybe
because I’m not Catholic; I’m not sure. I think he’s trying to
break the ice when he asks me, “Where did you two meet?”
Whenever there has been stress in my life, I’ve always started
joking around, trying to relieve the tension. Here’s my
opportunity, I think, and I can’t resist it. I slip my chair closer to
him. “Well, Father,” I begin, “you know I’m an FBI agent. I don’t
know if Pam told you her background.”
All the while I’m talking I’m getting closer to him, locking in
the eye contact I’d already learned to use in interrogations. I just
don’t want him to look at Pam because I don’t know how she’s
reacting. “We met at a place called Jim’s Garage, which is a
topless go-go bar. Pam worked there as a dancer and was quite
good. What really got my attention, though, was she was dancing
with these tassels on each of her breasts, and she got them
spinning in opposite directions. Take my word for it, it was really
something to see.”
Pam is deathly quiet, not knowing whether to say anything or
not. e priest is listening in rapt attention.
“Anyway, Father, she got these tassels spinning in opposite
directions with greater and greater velocity, when all of a sudden,
one of them flew off into the audience. Everyone grabbed for it. I
leaped up and caught it and brought it back to her, and here we
are today.”
His mouth is gaping open. I’ve got this guy totally believing
me when I just break up and start laughing, just as I did for my
phony junior high school book report. “You mean this isn’t
true?” he asks. By this point Pam has broken up, too. We both
just shake our heads. I don’t know whether the priest is relieved
or disappointed.
Bob McGonigel was my best man. e morning of the
wedding was rainy and dreary and I was itching to get on with it.
I had Bob call Pam at her mother’s house and ask if she’d seen or
heard from me. She, of course, said no, and Bob offered as how I
hadn’t come home the night before and he was afraid I was
getting cold feet and backing out. Looking back on it, I can’t
believe how perverse my sense of humor was. Eventually, Bob
started laughing and gave us away, but I was a little disappointed
not to have gotten more of a reaction out of her. Afterward, she
told me she was so shell-shocked about all the arrangements and
so concerned about having her curly hair frizz up in the humidity
that the mere disappearance of the groom was a minor concern.
When we exchanged our vows in church that afternoon and
the priest pronounced us husband and wife, I was surprised that
he had some kind words to say about me.
“I met John Douglas for the first time the other day, and he
got me thinking long and hard about how I feel about my own
religious beliefs.”
God knows what I said to make him think so deeply, but
sometimes He works in mysterious ways. e next time I told
the tassel story to a priest, it was the one Pam had called in to
pray over me in Seattle. And I got him believing it, too.
We had a brief honeymoon in the Poconos—heart-shaped
bathtub, mirrors on the ceiling, all the classy stuff—then drove to
Long Island where my parents had a party for us since few people
in my family had been able to come to the wedding.
After we were married, Pam moved to Milwaukee. She had
graduated and become a teacher. New teachers all had to do their
time serving as substitutes in the roughest inner-city schools.
One junior high was particularly bad. Teachers there routinely
were shoved and kicked, and a number of rape attempts had
been made against the younger female teachers. I’d finally gotten
off the recruiting detail and was putting in long hours on the
reactive squad, mostly handling bank robberies. In spite of the
inherent danger of my work, I was more concerned about Pam’s
situation. At least I had a gun to defend myself. One time, four
students forced her into an empty classroom, pawing at her and
assaulting her. She managed to scream and break away, but I was
furious. I wanted to take some other agents down to the school
and kick ass.
My best buddy at the time was an agent named Joe Del
Campo, who worked with me on bank robbery cases. We would
hang around this bagel place on Oakland Avenue, near the
University of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee campus. A couple named
David and Sarah Goldberg managed it, and before too long, Joe
and I became friendly with them. In fact, they started treating us
like sons.
Some mornings, we’d be in there bright and early, wearing our
guns and helping the Goldbergs put bagels and bialys in the
oven. We’d eat breakfast, go out and catch a fugitive, follow up
on a couple of leads in other cases, then go back for lunch. Joe
and I both worked out at the Jewish Community Center, and
around Christmas and Hanukkah time, we bought the
Goldbergs a membership. Eventually, other agents started
hanging around what we simply called “Goldberg’s place,” and
we had a party there, attended by both the SAC and ASAC.
Joe Del Campo was a bright guy, multilingual, and excellent
with firearms. His prowess played the central role in perhaps the
strangest and most confusing situation I’ve ever been involved
with.
One day during the winter, Joe and I are in the office
interrogating a fugitive we’d brought in that morning when we
get a call that Milwaukee police have a hostage situation. Joe’s
been up all night on night duty, but we leave our own subject to
cool his heels and head out to the scene.
When we get there, an old Tudor-style house, we learn that
the suspect, Jacob Cohen, is a fugitive accused of killing a police
officer in Chicago. He’s just shot an FBI agent, Richard Carr,
who tried to approach him in his apartment complex, which had
been surrounded by a newly trained FBI SWAT team. e crazy
guy then ran through the SWAT team perimeter, taking two
rounds in the buttocks. He grabs a young boy shoveling snow
and runs into a house. Now he’s got three hostages—two
children and an adult. Ultimately, he lets the adult and one of
the kids go. He holds on to the young boy, whose age we
estimate at about ten to twelve.
At this point, everyone is pissed off. It’s freezing cold. Cohen
is mad as hell, not exactly helped by the fact he’s now got an ass
full of lead. e FBI and Milwaukee police are angry at each
other for letting the situation degenerate. e SWAT team is
pissed off because this was their first big case and they missed
him and let him slip through their perimeter. e FBI in general
is now out for blood because he’s taken down one of their own.
And Chicago police have already gotten out the word that they
want to come get him, and that if anyone’s going to shoot the
suspect, they should have that right.
SAC Herb Hoxie arrives on the scene and makes what I
consider a couple of mistakes to compound the ones already
made by everyone else. First, he uses a bullhorn, which makes
him come across as dictatorial. A private telephone linkup is
more sensitive, plus it gives you the flexibility of negotiating in
private. en he makes what I consider his second error: he offers
himself as hostage in exchange for the boy.
So Hoxie gets behind the wheel of an FBI car. e police
form a circle around the car as it backs into the driveway.
Meanwhile, Del Campo tells me to give him a boost onto the
roof of the house. Remember, it’s a Tudor with steep-sloping
roofs that are slick with ice, and Joe’s been up all night. e only
weapon he’s got is his two-and-a-half-inch-barrel .357 magnum.
Cohen comes out of the house with his arm wrapped around
the boy’s head, holding him close to his body. Detective Beasley
of the Milwaukee Police Department steps out from the circle of
cops and says, “Jack, we’ve got what you want. Leave the boy
alone!” Del Campo is still creeping up the pitch of the roof. e
police see him up there and realize what he’s up to.
e subject and the hostage are getting closer to the car.
ere’s ice and snow everywhere. en suddenly, the kid slips on
the ice, causing Cohen to lose his grip on him. Del Campo
comes up over the peak of the roof. Figuring that with the short
barrel, the bullet may rise, he aims for the neck and gets off one
shot.
It’s a direct hit, an amazing shot, right in the middle of the
subject’s neck. Cohen goes down, but no one can tell whether
he’s been hit or if it’s the boy.
Exactly three seconds later, the car is riddled with bullets. In
the crossfire, Detective Beasley is hit in the Achilles tendon. e
boy scrambles on his hands and knees in front of the car, which
rolls forward on him because Hoxie’s been hit by flying glass and
has lost control. Fortunately, the boy’s not badly hurt.
True to FBI form, the local TV news that night shows the
special agent in charge, Herbert Hoxie, on a gurney being moved
out of the emergency room with blood trickling from his ear, and
while they’re wheeling him away, he’s giving his statement to the
press: “All of a sudden I heard gunfire, bullets were flying
everywhere. I guess I was hit, but I think I’m okay . . . ” FBI,
God, motherhood, apple pie, et cetera, et cetera.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Fistfights nearly break out and
the police almost beat up Del Campo for taking their shot. e
SWAT team isn’t any too pleased either because he’s made them
look bad. ey go to ASAC Ed Best to complain, but he stands
up for Del Campo and says that Joe salvaged the situation that
they let develop.
Cohen had between thirty and forty entrance and exit
wounds but was still alive when they took him away in the
ambulance. Fortunately for all concerned, he was DOA at the
hospital.
Special Agent Carr, miraculously, survived. Cohen’s bullet
passed through the trench coat Carr was wearing, into his
shoulder, ricocheted off his trachea, and lodged in his lung. Carr
kept that trench coat with the bullet hole in it and wore it
proudly from that day on.
Del Campo and I were a terrific team for a while, except when
we’d get on these laughing jags we couldn’t get off of. We were at
a gay bar once, trying to develop some informants on a
homosexual murder fugitive. It’s dark and it takes our eyes some
time to adjust. Suddenly, we become aware of all these eyes on
us, and we start arguing about which one of us they want. en
we see this sign above the bar, “A Hard Man Is Good to Find,”
and we just lose it, cracking up like two goofballs.
It never took much. We broke up once talking to an old guy
in a wheelchair at a nursing home, and again, interviewing a
dapper business owner in his mid-forties whose toupee had
slipped halfway down his forehead. It didn’t matter. If there was
any humor anywhere in a situation, Joe and I would find it. As
insensitive as it may sound, this was probably a useful talent to
have. When you spend your time looking at murder scenes and
dump sites, especially those involving children, when you’ve
talked to hundreds, then thousands, of victims and their families,
when you’ve seen the absolutely incredible things some human
beings are capable of doing to other human beings, you’d better
be able to laugh at silly things. Otherwise, you’re going to go
crazy.
•••
Unlike a lot of guys who went into law enforcement, I’d never
been a gun nut, but ever since the Air Force I’d always been a
good shot. I thought it might be interesting to be on the SWAT
team for a while. Every field office had one. It was a part-time
job; the five team members were called out as needed. I made the
team and was assigned as the sniper—the one who stays farthest
back and goes for the long shot. All the others on the team had
heavy military backgrounds—Green Berets, Rangers—and here I
had taught swimming to pilots’ wives and kids. e team leader,
David Kohl, eventually became a deputy assistant director at
Quantico, and he was the one who asked me to head up the
Investigative Support Unit.
In one case, somewhat more straightforward than the Jacob
Cohen extravaganza, a guy robbed a bank, then led police on a
high-speed chase, ending up barricaded in a warehouse. at was
when we were called in. Inside this warehouse, he takes off all his
clothes, then puts them back on again. He seems like a real nut
case. en he asks to have his wife brought to the scene, which
they do.
In later years, when we’d done more research into this type of
personality, we’d understand that you don’t do that—you don’t
agree to this type of demand because the person they ask to see is
usually the one whom they perceive as having precipitated the
problem in the first place. erefore, you’re putting that
individual in great danger and setting them up for a murdersuicide.
Fortunately, in this instance, they don’t bring her inside the
warehouse, but have her talk to him on the phone. And sure
enough, as soon as he hangs up, he blows his brains out with a
shotgun.
We’d all been waiting in position for several hours, and
suddenly it was over. But you can’t always diffuse stress that
quickly, which often leads to warped humor. “Jeez, why’d he have
to do that?” one of the guys remarked. “Douglas is a crackerjack
shot. He could have done that for him.”
I was in Milwaukee for a little more than five years.
Eventually, Pam and I moved from the apartment on Juneau
Avenue to a town house on Brown Deer Road, away from the
office, near the northern city limit. I spent most of my time on
bank robberies and built up a string of commendations clearing
cases. I found I was most successful when I could come up with a
“signature” linking several crimes together, a factor that later
became the cornerstone of our serial-murder analysis.
My only notable screwup during this time was after Jerry
Hogan replaced Herb Hoxie as SAC. Not many perks went along
with the job, but one was a Bureau automobile, and Hogan was
proud of his new, emerald green Ford Ltd. I needed a car for an
investigation one day and none was available. Hogan was out at a
meeting, so I asked the ASAC, Arthur Fulton, if I could use the
SAC’s. Reluctantly, he agreed.
e next thing I know, Jerry’s called me into his office and he’s
yelling at me for using his car, getting it dirty, and—worst of all
—bringing it back with a flat. I hadn’t even noticed that. Now
Jerry and I got along well, so the whole time he’s yelling, I can’t
keep from laughing. Apparently, this was a mistake.
Later that day, my squad supervisor, Ray Byrne, says to me,
“You know, John, Jerry Hogan really likes you, but he has to
teach you a lesson. He’s assigning you to the Indian reservation.”
ese were the days of the Wounded Knee incident and the
groundswell of consciousness over Native American rights. We
were hated on the reservations, as much as in the ghettos of
Detroit. e Indians had been treated terribly by the
government. When I first arrived at the Menominee Reservation
up on Green Bay, I couldn’t believe the poverty and filth and
squalor these people had to live in. So much of their culture had
been stripped away from them, they often seemed almost numb
to me. Largely as a result of the deplorable conditions and the
history of government hostility and indifference, on many of the
reservations you saw high incidences of alcoholism, child and
spouse abuse, assault, and murder. But because of the utter
mistrust of the government, it was nearly impossible for an FBI
agent to get any type of cooperation or assistance from witnesses.
e local Bureau of Indian Affairs representatives were of no
help. Even family members of victims wouldn’t get involved, for
fear of being seen as collaborating with the enemy. Sometimes,
by the time you would find out about a murder and get to the
scene, the body would have been there for several days already,
infested with insect larvae.
I spent more than a month on the reservation, during which
time I investigated at least six murders. I felt so bad for these
people, I was depressed all the time, and I had the luxury of
leaving and going home at night. I had just never seen people
who, as a group, had so much to overcome. While it was dicey,
my time on the Menominee Reservation was the first
concentrated dose of murder-scene investigation I’d had, which
turned out to be grim but excellent experience.
Without question, the best thing that happened during my
time in Milwaukee was the birth of our first child, Erika, in
November of 1975. We were to have anksgiving dinner at a
local country club with some friends, Sam and Esther Ruskin,
when Pam went into labor. Erika was born the next day.
I was working long hours on bank robbery cases and finishing
up my graduate degree, and the new baby meant even less sleep.
But needless to say, Pam bore the brunt of this. I felt much more
family-oriented responsibility as a result of fatherhood, and I
loved watching Erika grow. Fortunately for all of us, I think, I
had not yet begun working child abduction and murder. If I had
been, if I’d really stopped and thought about what was out there,
I don’t know that I could have adjusted to fatherhood as
comfortably. By the time our next child, Lauren, was born in
1980, I was well into it.
Becoming a father, I think, also motivated me to try to make
more out of myself. I knew that what I was doing wasn’t what I
wanted to be doing my entire career. Jerry Hogan advised me to
put in ten years in the field before I thought about applying for
anything else; that way, I’d have the experience for an ASAC and
eventually a SAC posting, then maybe eventually make it to
headquarters. But with one child and, I hoped, more to come,
the life of a field agent, moving from office to office, didn’t seem
terribly appealing.
As time went on, other perspectives about the job began to
evolve. e sniper training and SWAT team exercises had lost
their appeal. With my background and interest in psychology—I
had my master’s by this time—the challenging part of the work,
it seemed to me, was trying to manage the situation before it got
to the shooting stage. e SAC recommended me for a two-week
hostage-negotiation course at the FBI Academy in Quantico,
which had only been in operation for a couple of years.
ere, under the tutelage of such legendary agents as Howard
Teten and Pat Mullany, I got my first real exposure to what was
already known then as behavioral science. And that changed my
career.
5
Behavioral Science or BS?
I hadn’t been back to Quantico since new-agent training almost
five years before, and in many ways the place had changed. For
one thing, by spring of 1975, the FBI Academy had become a
complete and self-contained facility, carved out of a chunk of the
U.S. Marine base in the beautiful, gently rolling Virginia
woodlands about an hour south of Washington.
But some things hadn’t changed. e tactical units still
commanded all the prestige and status, and of these, the Firearms
Unit was the star. It was headed by George Zeiss, the special
agent who had been sent to bring James Earl Ray back from
England to face American justice after the 1968 assassination of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Zeiss was a huge, powerful bear of a
man who broke handcuffs with his bare hands as a parlor trick.
One time, some of the guys on the range took a pair and
soldered the chain, then gave them to Zeiss to do his thing. He
twisted so hard, he snapped his wrist and had to be in a cast for
weeks.
Hostage negotiation was taught by the Behavioral Science
Unit, a group of between seven and nine special agent
instructors. Psychology and the “soft sciences” were never held in
much esteem by Hoover and his cohorts, so until he died, this
was something of a “back room” endeavor.
In fact, much of the FBI at that time, as well as the law
enforcement world in general, considered psychology and
behavioral science as they applied to criminology to be so much
worthless bullshit. While clearly I never felt this way, I had to
acknowledge that a lot of what was known and taught in this
field had no real relevance to the business of understanding and
catching criminals, a circumstance several of us would try to
begin to rectify a couple of years later. When I took over as chief
of the operational side of the Behavioral Science Unit, I changed
the name to the Investigative Support Unit. And when people
asked me why, I told them, quite frankly, I wanted to take the BS
out of what we were doing.
e BSU, under Unit Chief Jack Pfaff at the time I took my
hostage-negotiation training, was dominated by two strong and
insightful personalities—Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany.
Teten is about six foot four with penetrating eyes behind wirerim glasses. ough an ex-Marine, he’s a contemplative type—
always totally dignified; the model of an intellectual professor.
He joined the Bureau in 1962 after serving with the San
Leandro, California, Police Department, near San Francisco. In
1969, he began teaching a landmark course called Applied
Criminology, which eventually (after Hoover’s death, I suspect)
became known as Applied Criminal Psychology. By 1972, Teten
had gone up to New York to consult with Dr. James Brussel, the
psychiatrist who had cracked the Mad Bomber case, who agreed
to personally teach Teten his profiling technique.
Armed with this knowledge, the big breakthrough of Teten’s
approach was how much you could learn about criminal
behavior and motives by focusing on the evidence of the crime
scene. In some ways, everything we’ve done in behavioral science
and criminal investigative analysis since then has been based on
this.
Pat Mullany always reminded me of a leprechaun. At about
five ten, he’s a roly-poly type with a quick wit and high energy
level. He came to Quantico in 1972 from the New York Field
Office with a degree in psychology. Near the end of his tenure at
Quantico, he would distinguish himself by successfully managing
very public hostage situations: in Washington, D.C., when the
Hanafi Muslim sect took over the B’nai B’rith headquarters, and
in Warrensville Heights, Ohio, when Cory Moore, a black
Vietnam vet, grabbed a police captain and his secretary right in
the station house. Together, Teten and Mullany represented the
first wave of modern behavioral science and made a distinct and
unforgettable pair.
e other instructors in the BSU also participated in the
hostage-negotiation course. ese included Dick Ault and
Robert Ressler, who’d arrived at Quantico a short time before. If
Teten and Mullany constituted the first wave, Ault and Ressler
constituted the second, moving the discipline further along as
something that could be of real value to police departments
throughout the United States and the world. ough at that time
we only knew each other as teacher and student, Bob Ressler and
I would soon join forces on the serial-killer study that led
ultimately to the modern version of what we do.
About fifty guys were in the hostage-negotiation class. In
some ways it was more entertaining than informative, but an
enjoyable two-week respite from field work. In class, we
examined the three basic types of hostage takers: professional
criminal, mentally ill, and fanatic. We studied some of the
significant phenomena that had arisen out of hostage situations,
such as the Stockholm syndrome. Two years before, in 1973, a
botched bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, had turned into an
agonizing hostage drama for customers and bank employees.
Ultimately, the hostages came to identify with their captors and
actually assisted them against the police.
We also watched the Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon,
which had recently come out, starring Al Pacino as a man who
robs a bank to get money for his male lover to undergo a sexchange operation. e film is based on an actual hostage incident
in New York City. It was this case, and the protracted
negotiations that ensued, that led the FBI to invite Capt. Frank
Bolz and Det. Harvey Schlossberg of the NYPD to bring the
Academy up to speed on hostage negotiation, an area in which
the New York people were the acknowledged national leaders.
We studied the principles of negotiation. Some of the
guidelines, such as trying to keep loss of life to a minimum, were
obvious stuff. We did have the benefit of audiotapes of actual
hostage situations, but it would be years later, when the next
generation of instructors came in, before students would be
involved in role-playing exercises—the closest you can get in the
classroom to hands-on negotiating. It was also somewhat
confusing, because a lot of the material had been recycled from
the criminal psychology classes and didn’t really fit. For example,
they would give us photos and dossiers of child molesters or lust
killers and discuss how such a personality would react in a
hostage situation. en there was more firearms training, which
was still the big thing at Quantico.
Much of what we eventually came to teach about hostage
negotiation was learned not in the classroom from other agents
but in the cold crucible of the field. As I mentioned, one of the
cases that earned Pat Mullany his reputation was that of Cory
Moore. Moore, who had been diagnosed a paranoid
schizophrenic, made a number of public demands after taking
the Warrensville Heights, Ohio, police captain and his secretary
hostage in the captain’s own office. Among them was that all
white people leave the earth immediately.
Now, in negotiating strategy, you don’t want to give in to
demands if you can possibly help it. Some demands, however,
aren’t terribly feasible under any circumstances. is certainly
qualified as one of those. e case got so much national attention
that the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, offered to
speak with Moore and help resolve the situation. While this was
certainly well intentioned on Mr. Carter’s part, and indicative of
the willingness he subsequently demonstrated for attempting to
settle seemingly intractable conflicts around the world, this is not
good negotiating strategy and I would never want it to happen in
a situation I was managing. Neither did Pat Mullany. e
problem with offering up the top guy, in addition to encouraging
other desperate little people to try the same thing, is that you lose
your maneuvering room. You always want to negotiate through
intermediaries, which allows you to stall for time and avoid
making promises you don’t want to keep. Once you put the
hostage taker in direct contact with someone he perceives as a
decision maker, everyone is backed against the wall, and if you
don’t give in to his demands, you risk having things head south
in a hurry. e longer you keep them talking, the better.
By the time I was teaching hostage negotiation at Quantico in
the early 1980s, we used a disturbing videotape that had been
made in St. Louis a couple of years before. Ultimately, we
stopped showing it because the St. Louis Police Department was
so upset by it. In the tape, a young black man holds up a bar. e
robbery’s a bust, he gets trapped inside, the police surround the
place, and he’s got a bunch of hostages.
e police organize a team of black and white officers to talk
to him. But as the tape shows, rather than trying to deal with
him on an objective level, they start jive-talking him and trying
to get down on his level. ey’re all talking at once, constantly
interrupting him, not listening to what he’s saying, not trying to
figure out what he wants to get out of this situation.
e camera swings away just as the chief of police arrives on
the scene—again, I’d never let this happen. Once the chief is
there, he “officially” ignores the demands, whereupon the guy
points the gun at his own head and blows his brains out for all to
see.
Contrast that with Pat Mullany’s handling of the Cory Moore
case. Obviously, Moore was crazy, and obviously, all the white
people weren’t going to leave planet Earth. But by listening to the
subject, Mullany was able to discern what Moore really wanted
and what would satisfy him. Mullany offered Moore a press
conference in which to air his views, and Moore released the
hostages bloodlessly.
•••
During the course at Quantico, my name got around the
Behavioral Science Unit, and Pat Mullany, Dick Ault, and Bob
Ressler recommended me to Jack Pfaff. Before I left, the unit
chief called me down to his basement office for an interview.
Pfaff was a personable, friendly guy. A swarthy chain-smoker, he
looked a lot like Victor Mature. He told me the instructors had
been impressed with me and told me to consider coming back to
Quantico as a counselor for the FBI National Academy program.
I was flattered by the offer and said I’d very much like to do that.
Back in Milwaukee, I was still on the reactive squad and the
SWAT team, but was spending much of my time going around
the state training business executives on how to deal with
kidnapping and extortion threats and bank officers on how to
deal with the single-bandit and gang armed robberies that were
plaguing rural banks particularly.
It was amazing how naive some of these sophisticated
businessmen were about personal security, allowing their
schedules, even their vacation plans, to be published in local
newspapers and company newsletters. In many cases, they were
sitting ducks for would-be kidnappers and extortionists. I tried to
teach them and their secretaries and subordinates how to evaluate
calls and requests for information, and how to determine
whether an extortion call that came in was genuine or not. For
example, it wasn’t unusual for an executive to get a call that his
wife or child had been kidnapped and that he was to take a
certain amount of money to such and such a drop. In point of
fact, that wife or child was perfectly safe and in no danger the
entire time, but the would-be profiteer had known that the
family member would be unreachable for whatever reason, and if
the criminal had one or two legitimate-sounding facts, he could
convince the panicked executive to accede to his demands.
By the same token, we were able to cut down on the success
of bank robberies by getting officials to institute some simple
procedures. One of the common robbery techniques was to wait
outside early in the morning when the branch manager would
arrive to open for the day. e subject would grab the guy, then
as other unsuspecting employees would arrive for work, they
would be taken, too. e next thing you know, you have a whole
bank branch full of hostages and a major mess on your hands.
I got some of the branches to institute a basic code system.
When the first person arrived in the morning and found that the
coast was clear, he or she would do one thing—adjust a curtain,
move a plant, turn on a particular light, whatever—to signal to
everyone else that all was okay. If that signal was absent when the
second person arrived, he or she would not go in, but would call
the police immediately.
Likewise, we trained tellers, who are the real key to any bank’s
security, what to look for and what to do in panic situations
without becoming dead heroes. We explained the proper
handling of exploding money packs, which were just then going
into wide usage. And based on the interviews I’d done with a
number of successful bank robbers, I instructed tellers to take the
holdup note as it was presented to them, then “nervously” drop it
on the floor on their side of the cage rather than hand it back to
the robber, thereby preserving a valuable piece of evidence.
I knew from my interviews that robbers don’t like to hit banks
cold, so it could be extremely valuable to make a note of
individuals coming into the branch whom you’ve never seen
before, particularly with a simple or routine request, such as the
exchange of paper money for a roll of dimes. If the teller had
been able to jot down a license number or noted any kind of ID,
a subsequent robbery could often be solved quickly.
I’d begun hanging out with city homicide detectives and
around the medical examiner’s office. Any forensic pathologist, as
well as most good detectives, will tell you that the single most
important piece of evidence in any murder investigation is the
victim’s body, and I wanted to learn as much as I could. I’m sure
part of the fascination also went back to my youthful days of
wanting to be a veterinarian and to understand how the
structures and functions of the body related to living. But though
I enjoyed working both with the homicide squad and the ME’s
staff, what really interested me was the psychological side: what
makes a killer tick? What makes him commit a murder under the
particular circumstances he does?
During my weeks at Quantico, I’d been exposed to some of
the more bizarre murder cases, and one of the most bizarre of all
turned out to be practically in my backyard—actually about 140
miles away. But that was close enough.
Back in the 1950s, Edward Gein had been a recluse living in
the farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin—population
642. He had begun his criminal career quietly, as a grave robber.
His particular interest was the corpse’s skin, which he removed,
tanned, and draped across his own body, in addition to adorning
a tailor’s dummy and various home furnishings. At one point he
had considered a sex-change operation—still revolutionary in the
midwest of the 1950s—and when that seemed impractical,
decided on the next best thing, which was making himself a
woman suit out of real women. Some speculate he was trying to
become his dead, domineering mother. If this case is starting to
sound familiar, aspects of it were used by both Robert Bloch in
his novel Psycho (made into the Hitchcock film classic) and
omas Harris in e Silence of the Lambs. Harris picked up the
story while sitting in on our classes at Quantico.
Gein could probably have continued living in ghoulish
obscurity had his fantasy needs not expanded into “creating”
more corpses to harvest. When we began our serial-killer study,
this escalation is something we came to recognize in virtually all
cases. Gein was charged with the murder of two middle-aged
women, though likely there were more. In January of 1958, he
was found legally insane and then spent the rest of his life in the
Central State Hospital at Waupun and the Mendota Mental
Health Institute, where he was always a model prisoner. In 1984,
Gein died peacefully at age seventy-seven in the Mendota
geriatric ward.
Needless to say, as a local detective or a special agent in the
field, you don’t get to see this sort of thing too often. When I got
back to Milwaukee, I wanted to learn as much about the case as I
could. But when I checked with the state attorney general’s
office, I found that the records had been sealed because of the
insanity angle.
Saying I was an FBI agent with an educational interest in the
crimes, I got the office to open the files to me. I’ll never forget
going with the clerk and taking the boxes off the endless shelves
and actually having to break a wax seal to get in. But inside, I
saw photographs that instantly became seared in my mind:
headless, naked female bodies, hung upside down by ropes and
pulleys, slit open in front all the way from sternum to vaginal
area with all genitalia cut out. Other photos showed severed
heads lying on the table, their blank, open eyes staring into
nothingness. As horrible as these images were to contemplate, I
began speculating as to what they said about the person who had
created them, and how that knowledge could have aided in his
capture. And in a real sense, I’ve been contemplating that ever
since.
At the end of September 1976, I left Milwaukee for my
temporary duty assignment, or TDY as a counselor for the 107th
National Academy session at Quantico. Pam had to stay on her
own in Milwaukee, running the house and taking care of oneyear-old Erika, while still teaching. is was the first of my many
professional absences over the years, and I’m afraid too many of
us in the Bureau, in the military, and in the foreign service give
too little thought to the incredible burdens on the spouse left
behind.
e FBI National Academy program is a tough, eleven-week
course for senior and accomplished law enforcement officials
from around the nation and the world. In many cases, Academy
students are trained right alongside FBI agents. e way to tell
the difference between trainees is by shirt color. FBI agents wear
blue while NA students wear red. Another thing: NA students
tend to be older and more experienced. To qualify, you have to
be recommended by your local commanding officer and accepted
by the Quantico staff. Not only does the National Academy
provide expert training in the latest in law enforcement
knowledge and techniques, it also serves as an extended and
informal environment for the FBI to build personal relationships
with local police officers, which has proved an invaluable
resource over and over again. e head of the National Academy
program was Jim Cotter, a real law enforcement institution
whom the police loved.
As a counselor, I was responsible for one section of students—
Section B—consisting of fifty men. Even though Director Patrick
Gray’s, and then Clarence Kelley’s, policies were opening the
Bureau from the narrow strictures of the Hoover years, no
women were yet invited to the National Academy. In addition to
the Americans, I had people from England, Canada, and Egypt.
You live in the same dormitories and you’re expected to be
everything from instructor to social director to therapist to den
mother. It was a way for the Behavioral Science staff to see how
you interacted with police, if you liked the atmosphere at
Quantico, and how you handled stress.
And there was plenty of that. Away from their families and
living in dorm rooms for the first time in their adult lives, unable
to drink in their rooms, sharing the bathroom with people they’d
never met before, pushed to physical challenges most of them
hadn’t had to endure since new-recruit training, the students got
an excellent education, but at a price. By about the sixth week,
many of the cops were going nuts, bouncing off the white cinderblock walls.
And this, of course, took its toll on the counselors as well.
Each one handled the assignment differently. As with everything
else in my life, I decided that if we were all going to get through
this in one piece, I’d better have a sense of humor. Some
counselors took other approaches. One was so strict and intense,
he’d be chewing his guys’ butts out during intramural games. By
the third week, his section was so pissed off, they gave him a set
of luggage—the symbolic message being, “Get the hell out of
here.”
Another counselor was a special agent I’ll call Fred. He’d never
had a drinking problem until he came to Quantico, but he sure
got one there.
e counselors were all supposed to watch for signs of
students becoming depressed. In fact, Fred had taken to locking
himself in his room, smoking and drinking himself into oblivion.
When you’re dealing with street-hardened cops, it’s survival of
the fittest. Any weakness and you’re dead meat. A really nice guy,
Fred was so sensitive and understanding and gullible, he didn’t
stand a chance with this crew.
ere was a standing rule: no women on the floor. One night,
one of the cops comes to Fred saying he “can’t take it anymore.”
at’s not something you want to hear as a counselor. His
roommate has a different woman in bed every night and he can’t
sleep. So Fred goes with the guy to the room and sees half a
dozen other men standing outside the door, waiting their turn,
holding money in their sweaty hands. Fred freaks, he barges in
on the guy who’s on top of this long-haired blonde, grabs him,
and pulls him off the woman, who turns out to be an inflatable
doll.
One week later, another cop comes to Fred’s room in the
middle of the night saying his depressed roommate, Harry, has
just opened the window and jumped. First of all, the windows in
the dorm building aren’t supposed to open. So Fred races down
the hall, into the room, peers out the open window, and sees
Harry covered with blood lying on the grass. Fred races down the
stairs and out to the suicide scene, whereupon Harry jumps up
and scares the shit out of him. It happens a bottle of ketchup had
been appropriated from the cafeteria that very night! By
graduation, Fred’s hair was falling out, he wasn’t shaving, his leg
was numb, and he was walking with a limp. A neurologist could
find nothing clinically wrong with him. A year later, back in his
field office, he was out on a medical disability discharge. I felt
sorry for the guy, but in one respect at least cops are a lot like
criminals: you’ve got to prove how tough you are with each.
Despite my easygoing and humorous approach, I was not
immune either, though fortunately, most of it was camp stuff.
On one occasion, my group removed all the furniture from my
room; on another, they short-sheeted my bed; and on several
more, they stretched cellophane across my toilet seat. You have to
be able to relieve stress somehow.
ere came a point when they were driving me nuts, I was
desperate to get away for a little while, and like the good cops
they were, they sensed that moment precisely. ey prop my
green MGB up with cinder blocks, lifting it just enough off the
ground so that the wheels missed by a small fraction of an inch. I
get in, turn on the engine, I pop the clutch, put the car in gear,
and futilely gun the engine, unable to figure out why I’m going
nowhere fast. I get out, cursing at the damn British engineering;
I open the hood, I kick the tires, I bend down and look under
the car. And all of a sudden, the entire parking lot is lit up.
ey’re all in their cars shining their headlights at me. Since they
claimed to like me, they actually put the car back on terra firma
for me after they’d had their fun.
e foreign students were in for their share, too. A lot of these
guys would come over with empty suitcases, go to the PX, and
buy like crazy. I particularly remember one high-ranking
Egyptian colonel. He’d asked a cop from Detroit what fuck
meant. (Big mistake.) e cop had told him, somewhat
accurately, that this was an all-purpose word that had many,
many different usages depending on the situation, but it was
almost always appropriate. One of its meanings is “beautiful” or
“classy.”
So he’s in the PX, goes over to the photography counter,
points, and booms out, “I wish to buy that fucking camera.”
e horrified young woman clerk says, “Excuse me?”
“I want to buy that fucking camera!”
Some of the other guys quickly get to him and explain that
while the term does have many usages, it is not used around
women and children.
en there was the Japanese police officer who had dutifully
asked one of the other cops the protocol for greeting instructors
one holds in high regard. So every time I saw him in the hallway,
he would smile, bow respectfully, and greet me with, “Fuck you,
Mr. Douglas.”
Rather than getting all complicated, I’d bow back, smile, and
say, “Fuck you, too.”
Generally, when the Japanese sent over someone to the
National Academy, they would insist on sending two students.
After a while it became clear that one would be the superior
officer and the other a subordinate who would be responsible for
shining the senior man’s shoes, making his bed, cleaning his
room, and generally acting as his servant. One time, several of
the other students went to Jim Cotter and complained that the
top guy was regularly practicing his karate and martial arts by
beating the hell out of his companion. Cotter took the top guy
aside, explained that every student was equal at the Academy, and
stated in no uncertain terms that this kind of behavior would not
be tolerated. But it just goes to prove the kind of cultural barriers
that have to be overcome.
I sat in on NA classes and got a sense of how they were
taught. By the end of the session in December, both the
Behavioral Science and Education Units offered me jobs. e
Education Unit chief offered to pay for more graduate school,
but I thought I’d be more interested in Behavioral Science.
I came back to Milwaukee a week before Christmas, so
confident I’d be getting the posting to Quantico that Pam and I
bought a five-acre lot in an area south of the FBI Academy in
Quantico. In January 1977, the Bureau announced a manpower
study, during which time personnel transfers would be frozen. So
there went my new job; I was stuck with this lot in Virginia and
had to borrow money from my dad for the down payment, and I
still had no idea what my future in the Bureau was going to be.
But then, several weeks later, I’m out on a case with an agent
named Henry McCaslin when I get a call from headquarters that
I’m going to be transferred to Quantico in June and assigned to
Behavioral Science.
At thirty-two years of age, I would be taking the place of Pat
Mullany, who was going on to the inspection staff at
headquarters. ose were big shoes to fill and I looked forward to
the challenge. My only real concern was the people I’d be
teaching. I knew how they could take apart counselors, even ones
they liked. I could only imagine how tough they’d be on
instructors who were trying to teach them their own business. I
had the right dance down, but I wasn’t sure if I knew the song
well enough. If I was going to be teaching them behavioral
science, I’d better figure out some way to eliminate as much of
the BS as I could. And if I was going to be able to say anything
of value to a police chief fifteen or twenty years older than me, I
knew I’d better have the goods to back it up.
And it was that fear that led me to the next stage of the
journey.
6
Taking the Show on the Road
Nine special agents were assigned to Behavioral Science when I
joined the unit in June of 1977, all primarily involved in
teaching. e main course offered to both FBI personnel and
National Academy students was Applied Criminal Psychology.
Howard Teten had originated it back in 1972, focusing on the
issue with which detectives and other crime solvers are most
concerned: motive. e idea was to try to give students an
understanding of why violent criminals think and act as they do.
Yet as popular and useful as this course was, it was based mainly
on research and teaching from the academic discipline of
psychology. Some of the material came from Teten’s own
experience, and later that of the other instructors. But at that
time, the only ones who could speak from the authority of
organized, methodical, broadly conducted studies were the
academics. And there was a dawning realization among many of
us that these studies, and this professional perspective, had only
limited applicability to the field of law enforcement and crime
detection.
Other courses offered at the Academy included:
Contemporary Police Problems, which dealt with labormanagement issues, police unions, community relations, and
associated topics; Sociology and Psychology, which mirrored the
typical introductory college curriculum; and Sex Crimes, which
often, unfortunately, was more entertaining than useful or
informative. Depending on who was teaching Sex Crimes, it was
taken with greater or lesser seriousness. One of the instructors set
the tone with a dirty-old-man doll dressed in a raincoat. When
you pushed down on the head, the raincoat flashed open and the
penis popped up. ey would also show hundreds of
photographs of people with various types of what are now called
paraphilias but were then generally known simply as perversions:
transvestism, various fetishes, exhibitionism, and so on. ese
would often elicit an inappropriate laugh from the room. When
you’re dealing with voyeurism or showing a man dressed in
women’s clothing, you might be able to squeeze a few chuckles
out of a particular photo. When you get into the extremes of
sadomasochism or pedophilia, if you’re still laughing, then there’s
something wrong with you or the instructor or both. It took
several long years and a lot of sensitization before Roy
Hazelwood and Ken Lanning came in and put the study of such
topics as rape and the sexual exploitation of children on a serious
and professional level. Hazelwood is retired now but still an
active consultant, and Lanning will retire soon. ese two guys
remain among the leading law enforcement experts in the world
in their respective fields.
But back in the “just the facts, ma’am” Hoover days, no one
in any position of authority considered what became known as
profiling to be a valid crime-solving tool. In fact, the very phrase
behavioral science would have been considered an oxymoron and
its proponents might as well have been advocating witchcraft or
psychic visions. So anyone “dabbling” in it would have had to do
so very informally with no records kept. When Teten and
Mullany began offering personality profiles, it was all done
verbally, nothing on paper. e first rule was always, “Don’t
embarrass the Bureau,” and you never wanted to document
something that could blow up in your—or your SAC’s—face.
rough Teten’s initiative and based on what he had learned
from Dr. Brussel in New York, some informal consulting was
provided to individual police officials who requested it, but there
was no organized program nor any thought that this was a
function the Behavioral Science Unit should perform. What
normally happened was that a graduate of the NA course would
call Teten or Mullany to talk about a case he was having trouble
with.
One of the early ones came from a police officer in California
desperate to solve the case of a woman who’d been murdered by
multiple stab wounds. Other than the viciousness of the killing,
nothing in particular stood out, and there wasn’t much to go on
forensically. When the officer described the few facts he had,
Teten advised him to start looking in the victim’s own
neighborhood—for a slightly built, unattractive loner in his late
teens who had killed the woman impulsively and was now
wrestling with tremendous guilt and fear of being found out.
When you go to his house and he comes to the door, Teten
suggested, just stand there, stare right at him, and say, “You know
why I’m here.” It shouldn’t be difficult to get a confession out of
him.
Two days later, the officer called back and reported that they’d
begun systematically knocking on doors in the neighborhood.
When a kid fitting Teten’s “profile” answered at one house, before
the cop could get out his rehearsed line, the young man blurted
out, “Okay, you got me!”
While it probably seemed at the time that Teten was pulling
rabbits out of a hat, there was a logic to the type of individual
and situation he described. And over the years, we would make
that logic more and more rigorous and make what he and Pat
Mullany were dabbling with in their spare time an important
weapon in the fight against violent crime.
As is often true with advances in a particular field, this one
came about largely by serendipity. e serendipity in this case
was that as a Behavioral Science Unit instructor, I really didn’t
think I knew what I was doing and felt I needed a way to get
more firsthand information.
By the time I got to Quantico, Mullany was just about to
leave and Teten was the overall guru. So responsibility for
breaking me in fell to the two guys closest to me in age and
seniority—Dick Ault and Bob Ressler. Dick was about six years
older than I was, and Bob, about eight. Both had done police
work in the Army before joining the Bureau. Applied Criminal
Psychology represented about forty hours of classroom
instruction over the eleven weeks of the National Academy
course. So the most efficient way of breaking in a new guy was
with the “road schools,” where instructors from Quantico taught
the same types of courses in highly compressed form to local
police departments and academies throughout the United States.
ese were popular and there was usually a waiting list of
requests for our services, mainly from chiefs and senior people
who’d been through the full NA course. Going out with a
seasoned instructor and watching him perform for two weeks was
a quick way of picking up what it was you were supposed to be
doing. So I started traveling with Bob.
ere was a standard drill to the road schools. You’d leave
home on Sunday, teach at one department or academy from
Monday morning to Friday noon, then move on to the next
school and do it all again. After a while, you started to feel like
Shane or the Lone Ranger—riding into town, doing your bit to
help the locals, then silently riding out again when your work
was done. Sometimes I wanted to leave a silver bullet for them to
remember us by.
Right from the beginning, I felt uncomfortable about what
amounted to teaching from “hearsay.” Most of the instructors—
myself prime among them—had no direct experience with the
vast majority of the cases they taught. In that way, it was very
much like a college course in criminology where, in most cases,
the professor has never been out in the streets experiencing the
kind of things he’s talking about. Much of the course had evolved
into “war stories,” told originally by whoever the officers on the
cases had been, then embellished over time until they had little
relationship to the actual events. By the time I came on the
scene, it had gotten to the point where an instructor would make
a pronouncement about a particular case only to be contradicted
in class by a student who had actually worked the case! e worst
part of it was, the instructor wouldn’t always back down but
would often insist he was right, even in the face of someone
who’d been there. is kind of technique and attitude can go a
long way toward making your class lose faith in everything else
you say, whether they have any personal knowledge or not.
My other problem was that I had just turned thirty-two years
of age and looked even younger. I was supposed to be teaching
experienced cops, many of them ten and fifteen years older. How
was I going to sound authoritative or teach them anything? Most
of the firsthand experience I had in murder investigation had
been under the wings of seasoned homicide cops in Detroit and
Milwaukee, and here I was going to be telling people like them
how to do their jobs. So I figured I’d better know my shit before
I faced these guys, and whatever I didn’t know, I’d better learn in
a hurry,
I wasn’t stupid about it. Before I would start a session I would
ask if anyone in the class had any direct experience with any of
the cases or criminals I planned on discussing that day. For
example, if I was going to be discussing Charles Manson, the first
thing I’d ask was, “Anyone here from LAPD? Anyone here work
this case?” And if there happened to be someone, I’d ask him to
give us all the details of the case. at way, I’d make sure I didn’t
contradict anything that an actual participant would know to be
true.
But still, even though you might be a thirty-two-year-old kid
fresh out of a field office, when you taught at Quantico or came
to teach from Quantico, you were presumed to speak with the
authority of the FBI Academy and all of its impressive resources.
Cops would constantly come up to me during breaks, or, during
road schools, call my hotel room in the evenings, asking for
pointers on active cases. “Hey, John, I’ve got this case that’s kind
of similar to what you were talking about today, What do you
think about this?” ere was no letup. And I needed some
authority for what I was doing; not authority from the Bureau,
but personal authority.
Now there comes a point on the road—at least there did for
me—when you realize there are only so many songs you can
listen to, so many margaritas you can drink, so much time you
can hang around the room staring at the television. at point
came for me in a hotel cocktail lounge in California early in
1978. Bob Ressler and I were doing a school in Sacramento. e
next day, driving away, I commented that most of these guys
we’re teaching about are still around, and most of them are going
to be on ice for the rest of their lives. Let’s see if we can talk to
them; ask them why they did it, find out what it was like
through their eyes. All we can do is try. If it doesn’t work out, it
doesn’t work out.
I’d long had a reputation as a blue flamer, and this didn’t do
much to diminish it in Bob’s eyes. But he did agree to go along
with my crazy idea. Bob’s motto has always been, “It’s better to
ask for forgiveness than permission,” and that certainly seemed to
apply here. We knew if we asked for sanction from-headquarters,
we wouldn’t get it. Not only that, anything we tried to do from
then on would be scrutinized. In any bureaucracy, you have to
watch blue flamers carefully.
California has always had more than its share of weird and
spectacular crimes, so that seemed like a good place to start. John
Conway was a special agent assigned to the FBI resident agency
in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco. He’d had Bob for a
class at Quantico, had excellent relations with the California state
penal system, and agreed to act as liaison and make the
arrangements for us. We knew we needed to have someone we
trusted, and who trusted us, because if this little project blew up
in everyone’s face, there would be plenty of blame to go around.
e first felon we decided to go for was Ed Kemper, who at
the time was serving out his multiple life sentences at the
California State Medical Facility at Vacaville, about midway
between San Francisco and Sacramento. We had been teaching
his case at the National Academy without ever having had any
personal contact, so he seemed like a good one to start with.
Whether he would agree to see us or talk with us was an open
question.
e facts of the case were well documented. Edmund Emil
Kemper III was born on December 18, 1948, in Bur-bank,
California. He grew up with two younger sisters in a
dysfunctional family in which his mother, Clarnell, and father,
Ed junior, fought constantly and eventually separated. After Ed
displayed a range of “weird” behavior, including the
dismemberment of two family cats and playing death-ritual
games with his older sister, Susan, his mother packed him off to
her estranged husband. When he ran away and went back to his
mother, he was sent to live with his paternal grandparents on a
remote California farm at the foothills of the Sierras. ere, he
was miserably bored and lonely, cut off from his family and the
little comfort that the familiar surroundings of his own school
afforded him. And there, one afternoon in August of 1963, the
tall, hulking fourteen-year-old shot his grandmother, Maude,
with a .22-caliber rifle, then stabbed her body repeatedly with a
kitchen knife. She had insisted he stay and help her with the
household chores rather than accompany his grandfather, whom
he liked better, into the fields. Knowing Grandpa Ed would not
find what he had just done acceptable behavior, when the old
man returned home, Ed shot him, too, and left the body lying in
the yard. When questioned by the police afterward, he shrugged
and said, “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.”
e seeming motivelessness of the double murder got Ed a
diagnosis of “personality trait disturbance, passive-aggressive
type,” and a commitment to the Atascadero State Hospital for
the criminally insane. He was let out in 1969 at age twenty-one,
over the objection of state psychiatrists, and placed in the
custody of his mother, who had left her third husband and was
now working as a secretary at the newly opened University of
California at Santa Cruz. By now, Ed Kemper was six foot nine
and weighed in at around three hundred pounds.
For two years he held odd jobs, cruised the streets and
highways in his car, and made a practice of picking up young
female hitchhikers. Santa Cruz and its environs seemed to be a
magnet for beautiful California coeds, and Kemper had missed
out on a lot in his teens. ough turned down for the Highway
Patrol, he got a job with the State Highway Department.
On May 7, 1972, he picked up two roommates from Fresno
State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. He drove
them to a secluded area, stabbed both young women to death,
then took their bodies home to his mother’s house where he took
Polaroid photos, dissected them, and played with various organs.
en he packed up what was left in plastic bags, buried the
bodies in the Santa Cruz mountains, and tossed the heads into
the deep ravine beside the road.
On September 14, Kemper gave a ride to a fifteen-year-old
high school girl, Aiko Koo, suffocated her, sexually assaulted her
corpse, then brought it home for dissection. e next morning,
when he had one of his periodic visits with state psychiatrists to
monitor and evaluate his mental health, Koo’s head was lying in
his car trunk. e interview went well, though, and the
psychiatrists declared him no longer a threat to himself or others
and recommended that his juvenile record be sealed. Kemper
reveled in this brilliantly symbolic act. It demonstrated his
contempt for the system and his superiority to it at the same
time. He drove back to the mountains and buried the pieces of
Koo’s body near Boulder Creek.
(At the time Kemper was active, Santa Cruz could boast the
unenviable title of serial-murder capital of the world. Herbert
Mullin, a bright, handsome, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic,
was killing both men and women, he claimed, at the urging of
voices directing him to help save the environment. On a similar
theme, a twenty-four-year-old recluse car mechanic who lived in
the woods outside of town—John Linley Frazier—had burned
down a house and killed a family of six as a warning to those
who would destroy nature. “Materialism must die or mankind
must stop,” was the note left under the windshield wiper of the
family’s Rolls-Royce. It seemed as if every week another outrage
was taking place.)
On January 9 of 1973, Kemper picked up Santa Cruz student
Cindy Schall, forced her into his trunk at gunpoint, then shot
her. As had become his custom, he carried her body back to his
mother’s house, had sex with it in his bed, dissected it in the
bathtub, then bagged the remains and flung them over the cliff
into the ocean at Carmel. His innovation this time was to bury
Schall’s head face-up in the backyard, looking toward his
mother’s bedroom window, since she’d always wanted people “to
look up to her.”
By now, Santa Cruz was gripped with terror of the “Coed
Killer.” Young women were warned not to accept rides from
strangers, particularly from people outside the supposedly safe
confines of the university community. But Kemper’s mother
worked for the college, and so he had a university sticker on his
car.
Less than a month later, Kemper picked up Rosalind orpe
and Alice Liu, both of whom he shot, then piled in the trunk.
ey received the same treatment as his previous victims when he
got them home. He dumped their mutilated bodies in Eden
Canyon, near San Francisco, where they were found a week later.
His compulsion to kill was escalating at an alarming rate, even
to him. He considered shooting everyone on the block, but
finally decided against it. He had a better idea—what he realized
he’d been wanting to do all along. On Easter weekend, as his
mother slept in her bed, Kemper went into her room and
attacked her repeatedly with a claw hammer until she died. He
then decapitated her and raped her headless corpse. As his final
inspirational touch, he cut out her larynx and fed it down the
garbage disposal. “It seemed appropriate,” he later told police, “as
much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so
many years.”
But when he turned on the switch, the disposal jammed and
threw the bloody voice box back out at him. “Even when she was
dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up!”
He then called Sally Hallett, a friend of his mother’s, inviting
her over for a “surprise” dinner. When she arrived, he clubbed
and strangled her, cut off her head, and left the body in his own
bed while he went to sleep in his mother’s bed. On Easter
Sunday morning, he took off in his car, driving aimlessly
eastward. He kept listening to the radio, expecting to have
become a huge national celebrity. Yet there was nothing.
Outside of Pueblo, Colorado, dazed and exhausted from lack
of sleep, disappointed that his grand gesture had not had more of
an impact, he pulled over at a phone booth beside the road,
called the Santa Cruz Police Department, and after repeated
attempts to convince them he was telling the truth, confessed to
the murders and his identity as the Coed Killer. He then waited
patiently as local police were dispatched to pick him up.
Kemper was convicted on eight counts of first-degree murder.
When asked what he considered to be the appropriate
punishment, he replied, “Death by torture.”
ough John Conway had made advance arrangements with
the prison officials, I decided it was best to request interviews
with the prisoners “cold” when we got there. Even though that
meant making the trip without the certainty of cooperation, it
seemed the best idea. Nothing stays secret in a prison, and if
word got out that a certain inmate had a relationship with, and
was talking to, the FBI, he could be considered a snitch or worse.
If we showed up unannounced, it would be clear to the prison
population that we were investigating something or other and
didn’t have any prior arrangement or deal. So I was somewhat
surprised when Ed Kemper readily agreed to talk to us.
Apparently, no one had asked him anything about his crimes for
quite some time, and he was curious about what we were doing.
Going into a high-security penitentiary is a chilling
experience, even for a federal law enforcement agent. e first
thing you have to do is surrender your gun. Obviously, they don’t
want any weapons available in the lockup areas. e second
requirement is that you sign a waiver stating that you absolve the
prison system of responsibility if you are taken hostage and
understand that in such an eventuality, you will not be bargained
for. Having an FBI agent as a hostage could be an enormous
bargaining chip. ose formalities having been taken care of, Bob
Ressler, John Conway, and I were ushered into a room with a
table and chairs to await Ed Kemper’s arrival.
e first thing that struck me when they brought him in was
how huge this guy was. I’d known that he was tall and had been
considered a social outcast in school and in the neighborhood
because of his size, but up close, he was enormous. He could
easily have broken any of us in two. He had longish dark hair
and a full mustache, and wore an open work shirt and white Tshirt that prominently displayed a massive gut.
It was also apparent before long that Kemper was a bright guy.
Prison records listed his IQ as 145, and at times during the many
hours we spent with him, Bob and I worried he was a lot brighter
than we were. He’d had a long time to sit and think about his life
and crimes, and once he understood that we had carefully
researched his files and would know if he was bullshitting us, he
opened up and talked about himself for hours.
His attitude was neither cocky and arrogant nor remorseful
and contrite. Rather, he was cool and soft-spoken, analytical and
somewhat removed. In fact, as the interview went on, it was
often difficult to break in and ask a question. e only times he
got weepy was in recalling his treatment at the hands of his
mother.
Having taught Applied Criminal Psychology without
necessarily knowing that everything I was saying was true, I was
interested in the age-old question of whether criminals are born
or made. ough there is still no definitive answer and may never
be, listening to Kemper raised some fascinating questions.
ere was no dispute that Ed’s parents had had a terrible
marriage. He told us that, from early on, he had looked so much
like his father that his mother had hated him. en his size
became an issue. By the time he was ten, he was already a giant
for his age, and Clarnell worried that he would molest his sister,
Susan. So she made him sleep in a windowless basement room
near the furnace. Every night at bedtime, Clarnell would close
the basement door on him, while she and Susan went to their
rooms upstairs. is terrified him and made him totally resentful
of the two women. It also coincided with his mother’s final
breakup from Ed’s father. Because of his size, shy personality, and
lack of a role model in the house to identify with, Ed had always
been withdrawn and “different.” Once he was shut up like a
prisoner in the basement and made to feel dirty and dangerous
without having done anything wrong, his hostile and murderous
thoughts began to blossom. It was then that he killed and
mutilated the two family cats, one with his pocketknife and the
other with a machete. We would later realize that this childhood
trait of cruelty to small animals was the keystone of what came to
be known as the “homicidal triad,” also including enuresis, or
bed-wetting, beyond the normally appropriate age and firestarting.
What was also sad and ironic was that at Santa Cruz, Ed’s
mother was popular with both administrators and students. She
was considered a sensitive, caring person you could go to if you
had a problem or just needed to talk something out. Yet at home,
she treated her timid son as if he were some kind of monster.
ere’s no way you can ever date or marry any of these college
coeds, was her apparent message. ey’re all much better than
you. Continually exposed to that attitude, Ed eventually decided
to fulfill her expectations.
In her own way, it must be said, she did try to take care of
him. When he expressed an interest in joining the California
Highway Patrol, she endeavored to have his juvenile record
expunged so the “stigma” of having murdered his grandparents
wouldn’t hold him back in adult life.
is desire to work with the police was another interesting
revelation, which was to come up over and over again in our
serial killer studies. e three most common motives of serial
rapists and murderers turn out to be domination, manipulation,
and control. When you consider that most of these guys are
angry, ineffectual losers who feel they’ve been given the shaft by
life, and that most of them have experienced some sort of
physical or emotional abuse, as Ed Kemper had, it isn’t surprising
that one of their main fantasy occupations is police officer.
A policeman represents power and public respect. When
called upon to do so, he is authorized to hurt bad people for the
common good. In our research, we discovered that, while few
police officers go bad and commit violent crimes, frequently
serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police
departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security
guard or night watchman. One of the things we began saying in
some of our profiles was that the UNSUB would drive a
policelike vehicle, say a Ford Crown Victoria or Chevrolet
Caprice. Sometimes, as in the case of the Atlanta child murders,
the subject had purchased a used and stripped police car.
Even more common is the “police buff.” One of the things Ed
Kemper told us was that he would frequent bars and restaurants
known to be police hangouts and strike up conversations. is
made him feel like an insider, gave him the vicarious thrill of a
policeman’s power. But also, once the Coed Killer was on the
rampage, he had a direct line into the progress of the
investigation, allowing him to anticipate their next move. In fact,
when Kemper called from Colorado at the end of his long,
bloody mission, he had a difficult time convincing the Santa
Cruz cops that this wasn’t all some drunken joke, that the Coed
Killer was really their friend Ed. Now, because of what we’ve
learned, we routinely consider the likelihood that a subject will
attempt to insinuate himself into the investigation. Years later,
working the Arthur Shawcross prostitute murders in Rochester,
New York, my colleague Gregg McCrary correctly predicted that
the killer would turn out to be someone that many of the police
knew well, who hung around their hangouts, and who
enthusiastically pumped them for information.
I was extremely interested in Kemper’s methodology. at he
was getting away with these crimes repeatedly in the same general
geographical area meant that he was doing something “right”;
that he was analyzing what he was doing and learning to perfect
his technique. Keep in mind that for most of these guys, the
hunting and killing is the most important thing in their lives,
their main “job,” so they’re thinking about it all the time. Ed
Kemper got so good at what he did that when he was stopped
one time for a broken taillight while he had two bodies in his
trunk, the officer reported how polite he was and let him off with
a warning. Rather than being terrified of discovery and arrest,
this was part of the thrill to Kemper. He dispassionately told us
that had the officer looked in his trunk, he was prepared to kill
him. Another time, he talked his way past a university security
guard with two women dying of gunshot wounds in the car.
Both were wrapped in blankets up to their necks, one next to
him in the front seat, the other in the back. Kemper calmly and
somewhat embarrassedly explained that the girls were drunk and
he was taking them home. e last part of the statement was
true. And on one occasion, he picked up a woman hitchhiking
with her young teenaged son, planning to kill them both. But as
he drove away, he saw out of his rearview mirror that the
woman’s companion had written down his license-plate number.
So he rationally drove the mother and son to where they were
going and dropped them off.
As bright as he was, Kemper had actually administered
psychological tests in prison, so he knew all the buzzwords and
could give you an analysis of his behavior in analytical psychiatric
detail. Everything about the crimes was part of the challenge,
part of the game, even figuring out how to get the victims into
the car without being suspicious. He told us that when he
stopped his car for a pretty girl, he’d ask her where she was going,
then glance at his watch as if trying to decide if he had enough
time. inking that she was dealing with a busy man who had
other more important priorities than stopping for hitchhikers
would immediately put her at ease and erase any hesitations.
Aside from giving us a look into a killer’s modus operandi, this
type of information would start suggesting something important:
the normal common-sense assumptions, verbal cues, body
language, and so on that we use to size up other people and make
instant judgments about them often don’t apply to sociopaths.
With Ed Kemper, for instance, stopping for a pretty hitchhiker
was his most important priority, and he had thought long, hard,
and analytically about how best to accomplish his objective;
much longer, harder, and more analytically than a young woman
encountering him casually would have done from her
perspective.
Manipulation. Domination. Control. ese are the three
watchwords of violent serial offenders. Everything they do and
think about is directed toward assisting them in filling their
otherwise inadequate lives.
Probably the most crucial single factor in the development of
a serial rapist or killer is the role of fantasy. And I mean this in its
broadest sense. Ed Kemper’s fantasies developed early, and they
all involved the relationship between sex and death. e game he
made his sister play with him involved binding him to a chair as
if he were in the gas chamber. His sexual fantasies involving
others ended with the partner’s death and dismemberment.
Because of his feelings of inadequacy, Kemper didn’t feel
comfortable with normal boy-girl relationships. He didn’t think
any girl would have him. So in his own mind, he compensated.
He had to completely possess his imagined partner, and that
meant ultimately possessing her life.
“Alive, they were distant, not sharing with me,” he explained
in a confession introduced in court. “I was trying to establish a
relationship. When they were being killed, there wasn’t anything
going on in my mind except that they were going to be mine.”
With most sexually based killers, it is a several-step escalation
from the fantasy to the reality, often fueled by pornography,
morbid experimentation on animals, and cruelty to peers. is
last trait can be seen by the subject as “getting back” at them for
bad treatment. In Kemper’s case, he felt shunned and tormented
by the other children because of his size and personality. And he
told us that before he dismembered the two family cats, he had
stolen one of his sister’s dolls and cut off its head and hands,
practicing what he was planning for living beings.
On another level, Kemper’s overriding fantasy was to rid
himself of his domineering, abusive mother, and everything he
did as a killer can be analyzed in that context. Please don’t get me
wrong; this in no way excuses what he did. Everything in my
background and experience tells me that people are responsible
for what they do. But in my opinion, Ed Kemper is an example
of someone not born a serial killer but manufactured as one.
Would he have had the same murderous fantasies had he had a
more stable and nurturing home life? Who knows? But would he
have acted on them in the same fashion had he not had this
incredible rage against the dominant female personality in his
life? I don’t think so—because the entire progress of Kemper’s
career as a killer can be seen as an attempt to get back at dear old
Mom. When he finally worked himself up to that final act, the
drama was played out.
is was another characteristic we were to see over and over
again. Seldom would the subject direct his anger at the focus of
his resentment. ough Kemper told us he used to tiptoe into his
mother’s room at night with a hammer and fantasize bringing it
down through her skull, it took him at least six killings before he
could actually get up the nerve to face what he really wanted to
do. And we’ve seen many other variations on this displacement
theme. For example, a common trait is to take some “trophy”
item from the victim after the murder, such as a ring or necklace.
e killer would then give that item to his wife or girlfriend,
even if that woman was the “source” of his anger or hostility.
Typically, he would say he had purchased the jewelry or else
found it. en, seeing her wear it, he both relives the excitement
and stimulation of the kill and mentally reasserts domination and
control, knowing he could have done to his own partner what he
did to his unfortunate victim.
Eventually, in our analysis, we would begin to break down the
components of a crime into such elements as pre- and
postoffense behavior. Kemper had mutilated each of his victims,
which at first suggested to us a sexual sadist. But the mutilation
was all postmortem, or after the victim’s death, rather than while
she was alive, thus not inflicting punishment and causing
suffering. After listening to Kemper for several hours, it became
clear that the dismemberment was more fetishistic than sadistic
and had more to do with the possession part of the fantasy.
Equally significant, I thought, was his handling and disposal
of the corpses. e early victims had been carefully buried far
from his mother’s home. e later ones, including his mother
and her friend, had virtually been left out in the open. at,
combined with his extensive driving around town with bodies
and body parts in the car, seemed to me to be taunting the
community he felt had taunted and rejected him.
We ended up doing several lengthy interviews with Kemper
over the years, each one informative, each one harrowing in its
detail. Here was a man who had coldly butchered intelligent
young women in the prime of their lives. Yet I would be less than
honest if I didn’t admit that I liked Ed. He was friendly, open,
sensitive, and had a good sense of humor. As much as you can
say such a thing in this setting, I enjoyed being around him. I
don’t want him out walking the streets, and in his most lucid
moments, neither does he. But my personal feelings about him
then, which I still hold, do point up an important consideration
for anyone dealing with repeat violent offenders. Many of these
guys are quite charming, highly articulate, and glib.
How could this man do such a terrible thing? ere must be some
mistake or some extenuating circumstances. at’s what you’re
going to say to yourself if you talk to some of them; you cannot
get the full sense of the enormity of their crimes. And that’s why
psychiatrists and judges and parole officers are fooled so often, a
subject we’ll get into in more detail later on.
But for now: if you want to understand the artist, look at his
work. at’s what I always tell my people. You can’t claim to
understand or appreciate Picasso without studying his paintings.
e successful serial killers plan their work as carefully as a
painter plans a canvas. ey consider what they do their “art,”
and they keep refining it as they go along. So part of my
evaluation of someone like Ed Kemper comes from meeting him
and interacting with him on a personal basis. e rest comes
from studying and understanding his work.
•••
e prison visits became a regular practice whenever Bob Ressler
or I were on a road school and could get the time and
cooperation. Wherever I found myself, I’d find out what prison
or penitentiary was nearby and who of interest was “in
residence.”
Once we’d been doing this for a while, we refined our
techniques. Generally, we were tied up four and a half days a
week, so I tried to do some of the interviews on evenings and
weekends. Evenings could be difficult because most prisons take
a head count after dinner and no one is allowed into the
cellblock after that. But after a while, you start to understand the
prison regimens and adapt to them. I found that an FBI badge
could get you into most penitentiaries and a meeting with the
warden, so I began showing up unannounced, which often
worked out best. e more of these interviews I did, the more
confident I began to feel about what I was teaching and telling
these veteran cops. I finally felt that my instruction was achieving
some reality base, that it wasn’t just recycled war stories from
those who had actually been there.
It wasn’t necessarily that the interviewees were providing
profound insight into their crimes and psyches. Very few had
that, even someone as bright as Kemper. Much of what they told
us parroted their trial testimony or self-serving statements they’d
made many times before. Everything had to be interpreted
through hard work and extensive review on our part. What the
interviews were doing, though, was letting us see the way the
offender’s mind worked, getting a feel for them, allowing us to
start walking in their shoes.
In the early weeks and months of our informal research
program, we managed to interview more than half a dozen killers
and would-be killers. ese included George Wallace’s would-be
assassin, Arthur Bremmer (Baltimore Penitentiary), Sarah Jane
Moore and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, both of whom had tried
to kill President Ford (Alderson, West Virginia), and Fromme’s
guru, Charles Manson, at San Quentin, just up the bay from San
Francisco and the rotting hulk of Alcatraz.
Everybody in law enforcement was interested in Manson. It
had been ten years since the grisly Tate and LaBianca murders in
Los Angeles, and Manson remained the most famous and feared
convict in the world. e case was regularly taught at Quantico,
and while the facts were clear, I didn’t feel we had any real insight
into what made this guy tick. I had no idea what we could expect
to get from him, but I thought that anyone who had so
successfully manipulated others to do his will would be an
important subject. Bob Ressler and I met with him in a small
conference area off the main cellblock at San Quentin. It had
wire-reinforced glass windows on three sides, the kind of room
set aside for inmates and their lawyers.
My first impression of Manson was just about diametrically
opposite from what I had of Ed Kemper. He had wild, alert eyes
and an unsettling, kinetic quality to the way he moved. He was
much smaller and slighter than I’d imagined; no more than five
two or five three. How did this weak-looking little guy exert such
influence over his notorious “family”?
One answer came right away when he climbed onto the back
of a chair positioned at the head of the table so he could look
down on us as he talked. In the extensive background
preparation I’d done for the interview, I’d read that he used to sit
on top of a large boulder in the desert sand when he’d addressed
his disciples, enhancing his physical stature for his sermons on
the mount. He made it clear to us from the outset that despite
the celebrated trial and voluminous news coverage, he didn’t
understand why he was in jail. After all, he hadn’t killed anyone.
Rather, he considered himself a societal scapegoat—the innocent
symbol of America’s dark side. e swastika he had carved into
his forehead during the trial was faded but still visible. He was
still in contact with his women followers in other prisons
through cooperative third parties.
In one sense at least, he was very much like Ed Kemper and so
many of the other men we talked to in that he had had a terrible
childhood and upbringing; if those two terms can be used at all
to describe Manson’s background.
Charles Milles Manson was born in Cincinnati in 1934, the
illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute named Kathleen
Maddox. His surname was merely a guess on Kathleen’s part as to
which of her lovers was the father. She was in and out of prison,
pawning Charlie off on a religious aunt and sadistic uncle who
called him a sissy, dressed him in girl’s clothing for his first day of
school, and challenged him to “act like a man.” By the time he
was ten, he was living on the streets, except for his terms in
various group homes and reform schools. He lasted four days at
Father Flanagan’s Boys Town.
His young adult life was marked by a series of robberies,
forgeries, pimpings, assaults, and incarcerations at increasingly
tougher institutions. e FBI had investigated him under the
Dyer Act for the interstate transport of stolen cars. He was
paroled from his latest imprisonment in 1967, just in time for
the “Summer of Love.” He made his way to San Francisco’s
Haight-Ashbury district, the West Coast magnet for flower
power and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Looking primarily for a
free ride, Manson quickly became a charismatic guru to the
turned-on dropout generation still in their teens and twenties.
He played the guitar and spoke in elliptical verities to
disillusioned kids. Soon he was living for free, with all the sex
and illicit stimulants he wanted. A nomadic “Family” of followers
of both sexes gathered around him, sometimes numbering as
many as fifty. As one of his services to the community, Charlie
would preach his vision of the coming apocalypse and race war,
which would leave the Family triumphant and him in control.
His text was “Helter Skelter” from the Beatles’ White Album.
On the night of August 9, 1969, four Manson Family
members, led by Charles “Tex” Watson, broke into the secluded
home of director Roman Polanski and his movie star wife,
Sharon Tate, at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills. Polanski was
away on business, but Tate and four guests—Abigail Folger, Jay
Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent—were viciously
slaughtered in a depraved orgy that included slogans scrawled on
the walls and victims’ bodies with their own blood. Sharon Tate
was nearly nine months pregnant.
Two days later, at Manson’s apparent instigation, six Family
members killed and mutilated businessman Leno LaBianca and
his wife, Rosemary, in their home in the Silver Lake district of
Los Angeles. Manson himself didn’t participate, but came in the
house afterward for the mayhem that followed. e subsequent
arrest for prostitution of Susan Atkins, who had participated in
both murders, and an arson involving a piece of highway
equipment, ultimately led back to the Family and perhaps the
most celebrated trials in California history, at least until the O. J.
Simpson extravaganza. In two separate proceedings, Manson and
several of his followers were sentenced to death for the Tate and
LaBianca murders and a number of others traced to them,
including the killing and mutilation of Donald “Shorty” Shea, a
movie stuntman and Family hanger-on who was suspected of
squealing to the police. When the state’s capital-punishment laws
were overturned, the sentences were reduced to life
imprisonment.
Charlie Manson was not your routine serial killer. In fact, it
was in dispute whether he’d actually murdered anyone with his
own hands. Yet his bad background was beyond question, and so
were the horrors his followers had committed at his instigation
and in his name. I wanted to know how someone sets out to
become this satanic messiah. We had to sit through hours of
cheap philosophizing and ramblings, but as we pressed him for
specifics and tried to cut through the bullshit, an image began to
emerge.
Charlie hadn’t set out to be the dark guru. His goal was fame
and fortune. He wanted to be a drummer and play for a famous
rock band like the Beach Boys. He had been forced to live by his
wits his entire life and so had become extremely adept at sizing
up the people he met and quickly determining what they could
do for him. He would have been excellent in my unit assessing
an individual’s psychological strengths and weaknesses and
strategizing how to get to a killer we were hunting.
When he arrived in San Francisco after his parole, he saw vast
hordes of confused, naive, idealistic kids who looked up to him
for his life experience and the seeming wisdom he spouted. Many
of them, particularly the young girls, had had problems with
their fathers and could relate to Charlie’s past, and he was astute
enough to be able to pick them out. He became a paternal figure,
one who could fill their empty lives with sex and the
enlightenment of drugs. You can’t be in the same room with
Charlie Manson and not be affected by his eyes—deep and
penetrating, wild and hypnotic. He knew what his eyes could do
and what effect they could have. He told us he had spent his
early life getting the shit beaten out of him, and with his small
stature, there was no way he could win a physical confrontation.
So he compensated by invoking the force of his personality.
What he preached made perfect sense: pollution is destroying
the environment, racial prejudice is ugly and destructive, love is
right and hate is wrong. But once he had these lost souls in his
sway, he instituted a highly structured delusional system that left
him in complete control of their minds and bodies. He used
sleep deprivation, sex, food control, and drugs to gain complete
dominance, like a prisoner-of-war situation. Everything was
black-and-white and only Charlie knew the truth. He’d strum his
guitar and repeat his simple mantra over and over again: only
Charlie could redeem the sick and rotting society.
e basic dynamics of leadership and group authority that
Manson described for us we were to see repeated over the years in
subsequent tragedies of similar dimension. e power over and
understanding of inadequate people that Manson possessed
would be revisited by the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass
murder-suicide of his flock in Guyana, then again by David
Koresh at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, to
name but two. And despite the glaring differences among these
three men, what links them together is striking. Insight we got
from talking to Manson and his followers contributed to our
understanding of Koresh and his actions and other cults.
At the heart of it, the issue with Manson wasn’t this messianic
vision but simple control. e “helter-skelter” preaching was a
way to maintain the mind control. But as Manson came to
realize, unless you can exert this control over your flock twentyfour hours a day, you risk losing it. David Koresh realized this
and holed up his devotees in a rural fortress where they couldn’t
leave or be away from his influence.
After listening to Manson, I believe that he did not plan or
intend the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends; that, in fact,
he lost control of the situation and his followers. e choice of the
site and victims was apparently arbitrary. One of the Manson
girls had been there and thought there was money around. Tex
Watson, the good-looking, all-American honor student from
Texas, sought to rise in the hierarchy and rival Charlie for
influence and authority. Zoned out like the others on LSD and
having bought into the leader’s new tomorrow, Watson was the
primary killer and led the mission to the Tate-Polanski house and
encouraged the others to the ultimate depravities.
en, when these inadequate nobodies came back and told
Charlie what they had done, that helter-skelter had begun, he
couldn’t very well back down and tell them they had taken him
too seriously. at would have destroyed his power and authority.
So he had to do them one better, as if he had intended the crime
and its aftermath, leading them to the LaBianca home to do it
again. But significantly, when I asked Manson why he hadn’t
gone in and participated in the killings, he explained, as if we
were dense, that he was on parole at the time and couldn’t risk
his freedom by violating that.
So I believe from the background information and the
interviews we did with Manson that while he made his followers
into what he needed, they, in turn, made him into what they
needed and forced him to fulfill it.
Every couple of years, Manson comes up for parole and has
been turned down every time. His crimes were too publicized
and too brutal for the parole board to take a chance on him. I
don’t want him let out, either. But if he were released at some
point, knowing what I do about him, I wouldn’t expect him to
be a serious violent threat like a lot of these guys are. I think he’d
go off into the desert and live out there, or else try to cash in on
his celebrity for money. But I wouldn’t expect him to kill. e
biggest threat would be from the misguided losers who would
gravitate to him and proclaim him their god and leader.
•••
By the time Ressler and I had done ten or twelve prison
interviews, it was clear to any reasonably intelligent observer that
we were onto something. For the first time, we were able to
correlate what was going on in an offender’s mind with the
evidence he left at a crime scene.
In 1979, we’d received about fifty requests for profiles, which
the instructors tried to handle between their teaching
responsibilities. By the next year, the caseload had doubled and
would double again the next. By then, I had pretty much been
relieved of teaching and was the only one in the unit devoting
full time to operational work. I would still give presentations to
National Academy and agent classes as my schedule allowed, but
unlike the others, for me teaching had now become a sideline. I
did virtually all the homicide cases that came into the unit and
whichever rape cases Roy Hazelwood was too busy to handle.
What had been an informal service without official sanction
was developing into a small institution. I took on the newly
created title of “criminal-personality profiling program manager”
and started working with the field offices to coordinate the
submission of cases by local police departments.
At one point, I was in the hospital for a week or so. My old
football and boxing injuries had messed up my nose, which had
made breathing progressively more difficult, and I was in getting
my twisted septum straightened out. I remember lying there
hardly able to see and having one of the other agents come in
and drop twenty case files on my bed.
We were learning more and more with each new prison
encounter, but there had to be a way to organize the informal
research into a systematized, usable framework. And that step
forward came through Roy Hazelwood, with whom I was
collaborating on an article about lust murder for the FBI Law
Enforcement Bulletin. Roy had done some research with Dr. Ann
Burgess, a professor of psychiatric mental-health nursing at the
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and associate
director of nursing research for the Boston Department of
Health and Hospitals. Burgess was a prolific author and already
widely known as one of the nation’s leading authorities on rape
and its psychological consequences.
Roy brought her to the Behavioral Science Unit, introduced
her to Bob and me, and described what we were doing. She was
impressed and told us she thought we had an opportunity to do
research of a kind that had never been done before in this field.
She thought we could contribute toward understanding criminal
behavior in the same way DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders—had toward the understanding and
organization of types of mental illness.
We agreed to work together, with Ann pursuing and
eventually obtaining a $400,000 grant from the governmentsponsored National Institute of Justice. e goal was to
exhaustively interview thirty-six to forty incarcerated felons and
see what kinds of conclusions we could draw. With our input,
Ann developed a fifty-seven-page instrument to be filled out for
each interview. Bob would administer the grant and be the
liaison with NIJ, and he and I, with help from agents in the field,
would go back into the prisons and face the subjects. We would
describe the methodology of each crime and crime scene, and
study and document the pre-and postoffense behavior, Ann
would crunch the numbers, and we’d write up our results. We
expected the project to take about three or four years.
And in that time, criminal-investigative analysis came into the
modern age.
7
e Heart of Darkness
e question logically arises, why would convicted felons
cooperate with federal law enforcement agents? We wondered
about that ourselves when we began the project. However, the
overwhelming majority of those we’ve approached over the years
do agree to talk to us, and they do so for a number of reasons.
Some of them are genuinely bothered by their crimes and feel
that cooperating on a psychological study is a way to make some
partial amends and also come to a better understanding of
themselves. I think Ed Kemper fits into this category. Others, as
I’ve indicated, are police and law enforcement buffs and just
enjoy being near cops and FBI agents. Some think there might
be some benefit in cooperating with the “authorities,” though
we’ve never promised anything in return. Some feel ignored and
forgotten and just want the attention and the relief from
boredom that a visit from us represents. And some simply
welcome the opportunity to relive their murderous fantasies in
graphic detail.
We wanted to hear whatever these men had to tell us, but we
were primarily interested in several basic questions, which we
outlined in an article explaining the goals of the study in the
September 1980 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.
1. What leads a person to become a sexual offender and
what are the early warning signals?
2. What serves to encourage or to inhibit the commission
of his offense?
3. What types of response or coping strategies by an
intended victim are successful with what type of sexual
offender in avoiding victimization?
4. What are the implications for his dangerousness,
prognosis, disposition, and mode of treatment?
For this program to be valuable, we understood, we would
have to be fully prepared and be instantly able to filter what each
man told us. Because if you’re reasonably intelligent, as many of
these guys are, you’re going to find a weakness in the system that
you can use to your advantage. By their very nature, most serial
offenders are good manipulators. If it’ll help your case to be
mentally unstable, you can be mentally unstable. If it’ll help your
case to be remorseful and contrite, you can be remorseful and
contrite. But whatever seemed to them to be the best course of
action to follow, I found that the people who agreed to talk to us
were all similar. ey had nothing else to think about, so they
spent a lot of time thinking about themselves and what they’d
done and could give it back to me in minute detail. Our task was
to know enough about them and their crimes in advance to make
sure they were telling us the truth, because they’d also had
enough time to construct alternate scenarios that made them
much more sympathetic or guiltless than the record would
indicate.
In many of the early interviews, after hearing our convict’s
story, I’d want to turn to Bob Ressler or whoever was with me
and say, “Could he have been railroaded? He had a sensible
answer to everything. I wonder if they really got the right guy.”
So the first thing we’d do when we got back to Quantico was
check the record and contact the local police jurisdiction for the
case file to make sure there hadn’t been some horrible miscarriage
of justice.
Growing up as a boy in Chicago, Bob Ressler had been
terrified and intrigued by the murder of six-year-old Suzanne
Degnan, who had been snatched from her house and killed. Her
body was discovered cut up in pieces in the sewers of Evanston.
A young man named William Heirens was eventually caught and
confessed to the killing and the murders of two other women in
an apartment building as part of some burglaries that escalated
out of control. In one of them, the murder of Frances Brown, he
had scrawled on the wall with her lipstick:
For heAVens
SAke cAtch Me
BeFore I Kill More
I cannot control myselF
Heirens attributed the murders to a George Murman
(probably short for “murder man”), who he claimed lived inside
him. Bob has said that the Heirens case was probably one of his
early motivations for pursuing a career in law enforcement.
Once the Criminal Personality Research Project was funded
and under way, Bob and I went to interview Heirens at
Statesville Prison in Joliet, Illinois. He had been incarcerated
since his conviction in 1946 and had been a model prisoner for
all that time, the first one in the state to complete his college
degree. He then went on to graduate work.
By the time we interviewed him, Heirens was denying any
connection to the crimes, saying he was railroaded. No matter
what we asked him, he had an answer, insisted he had an alibi
and wasn’t even close to any of the murder scenes. He was so
convincing and I was so concerned there might have been a
massive miscarriage of justice that when we got back to
Quantico, I dug out all the case files. In addition to the
confession and other compelling evidence, I found that his latent
fingerprints had been lifted from the Degnan crime scene. Yet
Heirens had spent so much time sitting in his cell and thinking
and giving himself all the answers that if they poly-graphed him
at that point, he would probably have passed with no trouble.
•••
Richard Speck, who was serving consecutive life sentences for the
murder of eight student nurses in a South Chicago town house
in 1966, made it clear he didn’t want to be lumped with the
other killers we were studying. “I don’t want to be on that list
with them,” he told me. “ey’re crazy, these people. I’m not a
serial killer.” He didn’t deny what he’d done, he just wanted us to
know he wasn’t like them.
On one key level, Speck was correct. He wasn’t a serial killer,
who kills repeatedly with some emotional cycling or cooling-off
period between his crimes. He was what I characterized as a mass
murderer, who kills more than twice as part of the same act. In
Speck’s case, he went to the house with burglary as his motive,
trying to get money to get out of town. When twenty-three-yearold Corazon Amurao answered the door, he forced his way in
with a pistol and knife, saying he was only going to tie her and
her five roommates up and rob them. He herded them all into a
bedroom. Over the next hour, three more women came home
from dates or studying at the library. Once he had them all in his
power, Speck apparently changed his mind, engaging in a frenzy
of rape, strangling, stabbing, and slashing. Only Amurao
survived, huddling terrified in the corner. Speck had lost count.
After he left, she went out on the balcony and called down for
help. She told police about the “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo on
the attacker’s left forearm. When Richard Franklin Speck showed
up in a local hospital a week later after a bungled suicide attempt,
he was identified by the tattoo.
Because of the brazen brutality of his crime, Speck had been
the subject of all kinds of speculation from the medical and
psychological communities. Initially, it had been announced that
Speck had a genetic imbalance, an additional male (Y)
chromosome, which was thought to increase aggressive and
antisocial behavior. ese vogues come and go with some
regularity. More than a hundred years ago, the behaviorists of the
times used phrenology—the study of skull shape—to predict
character and mental ability. More recently, it was thought that
an electroencephalograph reading showing a repeating fourteen-
and-six-spike pattern was evidence of severe personality disorder.
e jury is still out on the XYY issue, but the indisputable fact is
that many, many men have this genetic makeup and display no
extraordinary aggressiveness or antisocial behavior. And to cap
things off, when a detailed study was performed on Richard
Speck, it was found that his genetic makeup was perfectly normal
—he didn’t even have the extra Y.
Speck, who has since died in prison of a heart attack, didn’t
want to talk to us. His was one of the unusual cases where we
had contacted the warden, who’d agreed to allow us in, but he
didn’t think it was a good idea to let Speck know in advance of
our visit. When we arrived, we concurred. We could hear him
screaming and cursing from a holding pen where he’d been taken
so we could look at his cell. e other prisoners were going nuts
in sympathy with him. e warden wanted to show us the kind
of pornography Speck kept, but Speck was protesting furiously
over this violation of his space. Prisoners hate anything
resembling a shakedown. eir cells are the only semblance of
privacy they’ve got left. As we walked down the three-tiered
cellblock at Joliet, windows broken and birds flying up near the
ceiling, the warden warned us to stay close to the center so that
prisoners couldn’t reach us with urine or feces.
Realizing this wasn’t getting us anywhere, I whispered to the
warden that we’d just keep walking down the corridor without
stopping at Speck’s cell. With the subject-interview guidelines in
effect today, we might not have been able to spring ourselves on
him unannounced. In fact, the entire criminal-personality study
would be much more difficult to put together now.
Unlike Kemper or Heirens, Speck wasn’t exactly a model
prisoner. He had once built and hidden a crude miniature still in
the back of a false drawer in the cellblock guard’s wooden desk. It
produced hardly any alcohol, just enough to create a smell and
make the guards go crazy when they couldn’t find it. Another
time, he found an injured sparrow that had flown in through one
of the broken windows and nursed it back to health. When it
was healthy enough to stand, he tied a string around its leg and
had it perch on his shoulder. At one point, a guard told him pets
weren’t allowed.
“I can’t have it?” Speck challenged, then walked over to a
spinning fan and threw the small bird in.
Horrified, the guard said, “I thought you liked that bird.”
“I did,” Speck replied. “But if I can’t have it, no one can.”
Bob Ressler and I met him in an interview room at Joliet,
accompanied by his prison counselor, something akin to a
guidance counselor in high school. Like Manson, Speck chose
the head of the table, sitting on a credenza so he could be above
us. I started out by telling Speck what we wanted to do, but he
wouldn’t talk to us, only ranting about the “motherfucking FBI”
who wanted to look in his cell.
When I look at these guys, when I sit across a table from them
in a prison conference room, the first thing I try to do is visualize
what they must have looked like and sounded like when they
were doing the crimes. I’ve prepared myself with all of the case
files so I know what each has done and what he’s capable of, and
what I have to do is project this onto the individual sitting across
from me.
Any police-type interrogation is a seduction; each party is
trying to seduce the other into giving him what he wants. And
you have to size up the individual interviewee before you can
figure out how to approach him. Outrage or moral judgment
won’t accomplish anything. (“What, you sadistic beast! You ate
an arm?”) You have to decide what’s going to ring his bell. With
some, like Kemper, you can be straightforward and matter-offact, so long as you make clear you know the facts and they can’t
snow you. With the ones like Richard Speck, I learned to take a
more offensive approach.
We’re sitting there in the conference room and Speck’s making
a show of ignoring us, so I turn to the counselor. He was an
open, gregarious man, experienced at diffusing hostility—some
of the qualities we look for in hostage negotiators. I talk about
Speck as if he weren’t even in the room.
“You know what he did, your guy? He killed eight pussies.
And some of those pussies looked pretty good. He took eight
good pieces of ass away from the rest of us. You think that’s fair?”
Bob is clearly uncomfortable with this. He doesn’t want to get
down to the killer’s level, and he’s squeamish about mocking the
dead. Of course, I agree, but in situations like this, I think you
do what you have to.
e counselor answers me in kind and we go back and forth
like that. We would have sounded like high school boys in the
locker room if we weren’t actually talking about murder victims,
which shifts the tone from immature to grotesque.
Speck listens for a while, shakes his head, chuckles, and says,
“You fucking guys are crazy. It must be a fine line, separates you
from me.”
With that opening I turn to him. “How in the hell did you
fuck eight women at the same time? What do you eat for
breakfast?”
He looks at us as if we’re a couple of gullible rubes. “I didn’t
fuck all of them. at story got all out of proportion. I just
fucked one of them.”
“e one on the couch?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
As crude and disgusting as this all sounds, it’s starting to tell
me something. First of all, as hostile and aggressive as he is, he
doesn’t have much of a macho self-image. He knows he can’t
control all the women at once. He’s an opportunist—he’ll rape
one for the hell of it. And from the crime-scene photos, we know
that the one he chose was facedown on the couch. She was
already a depersonalized body to him. He didn’t have to have any
human contact with her. We can also tell he’s not a sophisticated
or organized thinker. It doesn’t take much for what would have
been a relatively simple and successful robbery to degenerate into
this mass murder. He admits that he killed the women not in a
sexual frenzy, but so that they couldn’t identify him. As the
young nurses come home, he’s putting one in a bedroom, one in
a closet, as if he’s corralling horses. He has no idea how to handle
the situation.
Interestingly, he also claims that the wound that sent him to
the hospital and ultimately to capture did not represent a suicide
attempt but rather was the result of a bar fight. Without
necessarily understanding the significance of what he’s saying,
he’s telling us he wants us to think of him as the “born to raise
hell” macho man rather than a pathetic loser whose only way out
is to kill himself.
Now, as I’m listening, I’m starting to turn all of this
information around in my mind. Not only is it telling me
something about Speck, it’s telling me something about this type
of crime. In other words, when I see similar scenarios in the
future, I’m going to have more insight into the type of individual
responsible. And that, of course, was the main purpose of the
program.
As we processed the study’s data, I tried to get away from the
academic, psychological jargon and buzzwords and more into
clear-cut concepts that would be of use to law enforcement
personnel. To tell a local detective that he’s looking for a
paranoid schizophrenic may be intellectually interesting, but it
doesn’t tell him much that’s useful in catching his UNSUB. One
of the key distinctions we came up with was whether an offender
was organized or disorganized or showed a mixed pattern. People
like Speck were beginning to give us the pattern of the
disorganized offender.
Speck told me he had a troubled early life. e only time I
could tell we’d touched a nerve was when I asked him about his
family. By the time he was twenty, he had chalked up nearly forty
arrests and had married a fifteen-year-old girl, with whom he
fathered a child. He left her five years later, angry and bitter, and
told us he just never got around to killing her. He did kill several
other women, though, including a waitress in a sleazy bar who’d
spurned his advances. He also robbed and attacked a sixty-fiveyear-old woman a couple of months before he murdered the
nurses. All things being equal, the brutal rape of an older woman
suggests to us a young man, possibly even a teenager, without
much experience or confidence or sophistication. Speck was
twenty-six when the rape occurred. As the age of the offender
goes up in the equation, his sophistication and self-confidence go
down accordingly. at was certainly my impression of Richard
Speck. ough in his mid-twenties, his behavior level, even for a
criminal, was late adolescent.
e warden wanted to show me one more thing before we
left. In Joliet, as well as in other prisons, a psychological
experiment was under way to see if soft pastel colors would
decrease aggressiveness. A good deal of academic theory was
behind this. ey’d even put police weight-lifting champs in
rooms painted pink or yellow and found they couldn’t lift as
much as they had before.
So the warden takes us to a room at the end of the cell block
and says, “e rose-colored paint is supposed to take the
aggression out of a violent offender. And if you put them in a
room like this, they’re supposed to get really calm and passive.
Take a look inside this room, Douglas, and tell me what you see.
“I see there’s not much paint on the walls,” I observe.
He replies, “Yeah, that’s right. See, the guys don’t like these
colors. ey’re peeling the paint off the wall, and they’re eating
it.”
•••
Jerry Brudos was a shoe fetishist. If that were as far as it went,
there would have been no problem. But due to a variety of
circumstances, including his punitive, domineering mother and
his own compulsions, it went a lot further—from mildly strange
all the way to deadly.
Jerome Henry Brudos was born in South Dakota in 1939 and
grew up in California. As a young boy five years old, he found a
pair of shiny high heels at a local dump. When he brought them
home and tried them on, his mother, furious, told him to get rid
of them. But he kept them, hidden, until his mother found out,
took them away, burned them, and punished him. By the time
he was sixteen, now living in Oregon, he was regularly breaking
into neighborhood homes and stealing women’s shoes and
eventually underwear, which he would save and try on. e next
year he was arrested for assaulting a girl he had lured into his car
so he could get to see her naked. He was given several months of
therapy at the state hospital in Salem, where he was not found to
be dangerous. After high school, he did a brief stint in the Army
before leaving on a psychological discharge. He was still breaking
into houses, and stealing shoes and underwear—sometimes
confronting the women he found there and choking them
unconscious—when, out of a sense of obligation, he married the
young woman with whom he had recently lost his virginity. He
went to a vocational college and became an electronics
technician.
Six years later, in 1968, now the father of two children and
continuing his nighttime raids for souvenirs, Brudos answered
the door to a nineteen-year-old named Linda Slawson, who had
an appointment to sell encyclopedias and had come to the wrong
house by mistake. Seizing this opportunity, he dragged her into
the basement, and bludgeoned and strangled her. When she was
dead, he undressed her and tried various of his collected outfits
on the corpse. Before disposing of the body by sinking it in the
Willamette River with a junked automobile transmission, he cut
off the left foot, placed it in one of his prized high heels, and
locked it in his freezer. He killed three more times over the next
several months, cutting off breasts and making plastic molds of
them. He was identified by various coeds he’d approached for
dates using a similar story and was picked up when police staked
out a supposed rendezvous site. He confessed and eventually
pleaded guilty when it became clear an insanity defense wouldn’t
work.
Bob Ressler and I interviewed him in his permanent home at
the Oregon State Penitentiary at Salem. He was heavyset and
round-faced, polite and cooperative. But when I asked him
specifics about the crimes, he said he’d blacked out because of
hypoglycemia and didn’t remember anything he might have
done.
“You know, John, I get this attack of low blood sugar, and I
could walk off the roof of a building and not know what I was
doing.”
Interestingly enough, when Brudos confessed to police, he
remembered well enough to give them graphic details of the
crimes and where the bodies and evidence could be found. He
also inadvertently incriminated himself. He’d hung the body of
one of his victims from a hook in his garage, clothed her in his
favorite attire and shoes, then placed a mirror on the floor
beneath her to see up her dress. While taking a picture, he’d
unknowingly captured his own image in the photograph.
Despite his claims of hypoglycemic blackouts, Brudos showed
many of the traits of an organized offender. is was tied in to
the fantasy element he displayed from an early age. When he was
a young teen living on the family farm, he fantasized about
capturing girls in a tunnel where he would force them to do what
he wanted. Once, he managed to trick a girl into the barn, then
ordered her to undress so he could take her picture. We saw this
type of behavior carry over into his adult offenses, yet as a young
teenager, he was too naive and unsophisticated to think of
anything other than photographing his naked victims. After the
session in the barn, he locked the girl in the corncrib, then came
back sometime later, wearing different clothes and with his hair
combed differently, pretending to be Ed, Jerry’s twin brother. He
released the terrified girl, explaining that Jerry was undergoing
intense therapy and begging her not to tell anyone lest he get in
trouble and suffer another “set-back.”
What we see clearly in Jerome Brudos, along with this
textbook escalation of activities, is a continual refinement of the
fantasy. is is a much more significant finding than anything he
could have told us directly. Even though a Kemper and a Brudos
are so different in goals and modus operandi, we see in both—
and so many of the others—an obsession with and
“improvement” of the details from one crime to the next and one
level of activity to the next. Kemper’s victims of choice were
beautiful coeds tied in his mind to his mother. e less
sophisticated and intelligent Brudos was more content with
victims of opportunity. But the obsession with detail was the
same and took over both men’s lives.
As an adult, Brudos made his wife, Darcie, dress in his
fetishistic attire and submit to his photographic ritual, even
though she was a straight, unadventuresome woman who was
uncomfortable with this and scared of her husband. He had
elaborate fantasies of constructing a torture suite but had to settle
for his garage. In that garage was the freezer he kept locked so he
could store his favorite body parts. When Darcie cooked meat
for dinner, she had to tell Jerry, what it was she wanted, and then
he would bring it to her. She often complained to friends that it
would be so much easier to look in the freezer herself and select a
particular cut. Yet despite the inconvenience, she didn’t think it
odd enough to report. Or if she did, she was too afraid to do so.
Brudos was a near classic example of an offender who begins
with innocuous oddities and escalates progressively—from found
shoes to his sister’s clothing to the possessions of other women.
First he just steals from clotheslines, then he stalks women who
are wearing high heels and breaks into empty houses, then gets
bolder and is willing to confront the occupants. At first, merely
putting on the clothing is enough, but eventually he wants more
of a kick. Socially, he begins to ask girls to let him take pictures
of them. en, when one of them refuses to undress for him, he
threatens her with a knife. He doesn’t kill until a victim of
opportunity happens to ring his doorbell. But once he’s killed her
and realizes the satisfaction, he’s moved to do it again and again,
each time stepping up his mutilation of the corpse.
I’m not meaning to suggest that every man attracted to stiletto
heels or turned on by the thought of black lace bras and panties
is destined for a life of crime. If that were true, most of us would
be in prison. But as we see in Jerry Brudos, this kind of
paraphilia can be degenerative, and it is also “situational.” Let me
give an example.
Some time ago, not far from where I lived, an elementary
school principal reportedly had a thing for children’s feet. He
would play a game with them to see how long he could tickle
their feet or toes. If they held out for a certain time, he would
give them money. It came to parental attention when some of the
kids were spending money at the mall they couldn’t account for.
When the principal was fired by the school district, many
quarters of the community protested. He was a good-looking
guy, he had a normal relationship with a steady girlfriend, and he
was popular with children and parents alike. e teachers
thought he was being railroaded. Even if he did have this thing
for toes, it was essentially harmless. He’d never abused any of the
children or tried to get them to undress. is is not the kind of
person who’s going to go out and abduct a child to feed his
perversion.
I agreed with that assessment. e community was in no
danger from him in that regard. I had met him and he was
friendly and personable. But let’s say during one of these games a
little girl reacts badly, starts screaming or threatens to tell on him.
In an instant of panic, he could end up killing the child simply
because he doesn’t know what else to do to manage the situation.
When the school superintendent contacted my unit for advice, I
told him I thought he had taken the right action in firing the
man.
Around the same time, I was called down to the University of
Virginia, where college girls were getting pushed to the ground
and their clog-type shoes stolen in the melee. Fortunately, none
of the women were badly hurt, and the local and campus police
were treating the cases as something of a joke. I met with them
and with the university administration, told them about Brudos
and others I’d had experience with, and by the time I left I’d
succeeded in my mission of putting the fear of God into them.
e official attitude changed considerably after that, and I’m
pleased to say there were no further incidents.
When I look at Jerry Brudos’s criminal progression, I have to
ask myself whether understanding and intervention at any of the
earliest stages could have short-circuited the ultimate process.
In Ed Kemper, I felt I saw a serial killer manufactured by an
emotionally harrowing childhood. I found Jerry Brudos’s case
somewhat more complex. Clearly, his particular paraphilia was
with him from a very early age. He was a small child when he
became fascinated by the pair of high heels he found in the
junkyard. But part of his fascination could have been never
having seen anything like them before. ey were nothing like
what his mother wore. en, when she reacted so vociferously,
they became forbidden fruit to him. Not too long after, he stole
shoes belonging to his teacher. Yet when she found out, he was
surprised by her reaction. Rather than reproving him, she was
curious to know why he’d done this. So he was already getting
mixed messages from adult women about what he was doing,
and a presumably inborn urge was gradually being transformed
into something sinister and far more deadly.
What would have happened had the dangerousness of his
progression been recognized, and some productive means been
tried to deal with his feelings? By the time of the first kill, it’s way
too late. But at any step along the way, could the process have
been short-circuited? rough the study and my work since then,
I’ve become very, very pessimistic about anything remotely akin
to rehabilitation for most sexually motivated killers. If anything
has a hope of working, it has to come at a much earlier stage,
before they get to the point at which fantasy becomes reality.
•••
When my sister, Arlene, was a teenager, my mom used to say she
could tell a lot about the boys Arlene was going out with by
asking them how they felt about their mothers. If the boy
professed love and respect for his mother, that would probably
reflect his relationships with other women in his life. If he
thought of his mother as a bitch or whore or ball-buster, chances
were pretty darn good he’d end up treating other women the
same way.
From my experience, my mom’s observation was right on the
money. Ed Kemper cut a trail of destruction through Santa Cruz,
California, before he finally worked up the nerve to kill the one
woman he truly hated. Monte Rissell, who raped and murdered
five women as a teenager in Alexandria, Virginia, told us that if
he had been allowed to go with his father instead of his mother
when their seriously troubled marriage broke up, he thought he’d
be a lawyer now rather than a lifer at the Richmond Penitentiary,
where we interviewed him.
With Monte Ralph Rissell, we were able to start piecing
together more parts of the puzzle. At seven, Monte was the
youngest of three children at the time of the divorce, and his
mother uprooted them and moved to California, where she
remarried and spent much of the time alone with her new
husband, leaving the kids with little adult supervision. Monte
started getting into trouble early—writing obscene graffiti at
school, then drugs, then shooting a cousin with a BB gun after
an argument. He claimed that his stepfather had given him the
rifle and, after the impulsive shooting, smashed it apart and hit
Monte repeatedly with the barrel.
When Monte was twelve, this second marriage broke apart
and the family moved back to Virginia. Monte told us he
thought he and his sister were responsible. From then on, his
crime career escalated: driving without a license, burglary, car
theft, then rape.
His transition to murder was very instructive. Still in high
school, on probation and receiving psychiatric counseling as a
provision of the probation, he receives a letter from his girlfriend.
She’s a year ahead of him in school and now away at college. e
letter told Monte that their relationship was over. He promptly
gets in his car and drives up to the college, where he spots the girl
with a new boyfriend.
Rather than do anything overt or take his rage out on the
person who caused it, he drives back home to Alexandria,
fortifies himself with some beer and marijuana, and spends hours
sitting in his car in the parking lot of his apartment complex
ruminating.
Around two or three in the morning, he’s still there when
another car appears, driven by a single woman. On the spur of
the moment, Rissell decides to get back what he’s just lost. He
goes up to the woman’s car, pulls a handgun on her, and forces
her to go with him to a secluded area near the complex.
Rissell was calm, deliberate, and precise as he recounted his
actions to Bob Ressler and me. I’d checked his IQ beforehand,
and it was above 120. I can’t say I detected a lot of remorse or
contrition—except for the rare offenders who turn themselves in
or commit suicide, the remorse is primarily over getting caught
and going to jail. But he didn’t try to minimize his crimes and I
did feel he was giving us an accurate account. And the behavior
he had just described, and was about to describe, contained
several key insights.
First of all, this incident takes place after a triggering event or
incident—what we came to call a stressor. And we would see this
pattern over and over again. Anything can be a triggering
stressor; different things bother each of us. But the two most
common ones, not surprisingly, are losing your job and losing
your wife or girlfriend. (I use the feminine here because, as I’ve
noted, virtually all of these killers are men, for reasons I’ll
speculate about later.)
As a result of studying people like Monte Rissell, we came to
realize that these stressors are so much a part of the serial murder
dynamic that when we see certain circumstances at a crime scene,
we feel comfortable predicting exactly what the stressor was in
the particular case. In Jud Ray’s Alaskan murder case, which I
mentioned in chapter 4, the timing and details of the triple
homicide of a woman and her two young daughters led Jud to
predict the killer had lost his girlfriend and his job. Both of these
traumas had taken place. In fact, the girlfriend had dumped the
subject for his boss, who had then fired him to get him out of the
picture.
So on the night that he sees his girl with a college man,
Monte Rissell commits his first murder. is is significant
enough in itself. But exactly how and why it happens tells us
even more.
It turns out by happenstance that Rissell’s victim is a
prostitute, which means two things: she’s not going to have the
same fear of sex with a stranger that someone outside the
profession would; and though scared, she’ll probably have a
pretty good survival instinct. So when he’s got her all alone and
it’s clear he intends to rape her at gunpoint, she tries to diffuse
the situation by hiking up her skirt and asking her attacker how
he likes it and what position he wants her in.
“She asked which way I wanted it,” he told us.
But rather than making him gentler or more sensitive, this
behavior on her part only enrages him. “It’s like this bitch is
trying to control things.” She apparently faked two or three
orgasms to placate him, but this made things worse. If she could
“enjoy” this rape, it reinforced his feeling that women are whores.
She became depersonalized, and it was easy to think about killing
her.
Yet he did let another victim go when she told him she was
caring for her father, who was suffering from cancer. Rissell’s
brother had had cancer, so he identified with her. She had
become personalized to him, just the opposite of this prostitute,
or the young nurse Richard Speck had attacked as she lay bound
and facedown on the couch.
But this does point out why it is so difficult to give general
advice on what to do in a rape situation. Depending on the
personality of the rapist and his motivation for the crime, either
going along or trying to talk your way out of being assaulted may
be the best course of action. Or it may make things worse.
Resisting or struggling with the so-called “power reassurance
rapist” might stop him in his tracks. Resisting the “anger
excitation rapist,” unless the victim’s strong enough or quick
enough to get away from him, could get a victim killed. Trying
to make the act seem pleasurable because the rapist is sexually
inadequate isn’t necessarily the best strategy. ese are crimes of
anger and hostility and the assertion of power. e sex is only
incidental.
After the rape of the woman abducted from the parking lot, as
angry as he is, Rissell hasn’t yet decided what to do with his
victim. But at this point she does what many of us would
perceive to be the logical thing: she tries to run away. is makes
him feel even more that she’s controlling the situation, not him.
As we quoted Rissell in an article on the study for the American
Journal of Psychiatry: “She took off running down the ravine.
at’s when I grabbed her. I had her in an armlock. She was
bigger than me. I started choking her . . . she stumbled . . . we
rolled down the hill and into the water. I banged her head against
the side of a rock and held her head underwater.”
What we were learning was that the behavior of the victim is
equally as important in analyzing the crime as the behavior of the
subject. Was this a high- or low-risk victim? What did she say or
do, and did that egg the subject on or pull him back? What was
their encounter all about?
Rissell’s victims of choice were merely close by—in and
around his apartment complex. And once he had killed, that
taboo was gone. He realized he could do it, enjoy it, and get
away with it. If we’d been called into this case and were profiling
an UNSUB, we would expect to see some experience in his
background—some violent crime short of murder—which, in
fact, there was. Quite frankly, what we probably would have
gotten wrong, at least initially, was the age. At the time of this
first kill, Rissell was barely nineteen. We would have expected a
man in his mid- to late twenties.
But Rissell’s case demonstrates that age is a relative concept in
our work. In 1989, Gregg McCrary from my unit was called into
a baffling series of prostitute murders in Rochester, New York.
Working closely with Capt. Lynde Johnson and a first-rate police
force, Gregg developed a detailed profile and suggested a strategy
that ultimately led to the arrest and successful prosecution of
Arthur Shawcross. When we reviewed the profile afterward, we
found that Gregg had nailed him almost precisely—race,
personality, type of job, home life, car, hobbies, familiarity with
the area, relationship to the police; virtually everything except the
age. Gregg had predicted a man in his late twenties to about
thirty with some already established comfort level for murder. In
fact, Shawcross was forty-five. It turned out he’d been in prison
for fifteen years for the murder of two young children (like
prostitutes and the elderly, children are vulnerable targets), which
had essentially put him on hold. Within months of his parole, he
picked up where he’d left off.
Just as Arthur Shawcross was on parole at the time of his
murders, so was Monte Rissell. And like Ed Kemper, he was able
to convince a psychiatrist he was making excellent progress while
he was actually killing human beings. is is kind of a sick
version of the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to
change a light-bulb—the answer being just one, but only if the
lightbulb wants to change. Psychiatrists and mental health
professionals are accustomed to using self-reporting on the part
of the subject to track his progress, and this assumes the patient
wants to get “well.” It has turned out to be incredibly easy to fool
many psychiatrists, and most of the good ones will say that the
only fairly reliable predictor of violence is a past history of
violence. One of the things I hope we’ve accomplished with the
criminal-personality study and our work since then is to make
the mental health community aware of the limitations of selfreporting where criminal behavior is concerned. By his very
nature, a serial killer or rapist is manipulative, narcissistic, and
totally egocentric. He will tell a parole officer or prison
psychiatrist whatever he or she wants to hear, whatever it will
take to get out of prison or stay on the streets.
As Rissell described his subsequent kills to us, we saw a steady
progression. He was annoyed by his second victim’s barraging
him with questions: “She wanted to know why I wanted to do
this; why I picked her; didn’t I have a girlfriend; what was my
problem; what was I going to do.”
She was driving the car at gunpoint, and like the first, she
tried to escape. At that point, he realized he had to kill her,
stabbing her repeatedly in the chest.
By the time of the third kill, it was all pretty easy. He’d
learned from his previous experience and wouldn’t let this victim
talk to him; he had to keep her depersonalized. “I was
thinking . . . I’ve killed two. I might as well kill this one, too.”
At this point in the progression he released the woman caring
for her father with cancer. But by the final two murders, his
intention was well established. He drowned one and stabbed the
other—between fifty and a hundred times by his own estimate.
Like virtually all the others, Rissell showed us that the fantasy
was in place long before the actual rapes or murders began. We
asked him where he’d gotten his ideas. ey came from a number
of places as it turned out, but one of them, he said, was reading
about David Berkowitz.
•••
David Berkowitz, known first as the “.44-Caliber Killer” and
then as the “Son of Sam” after he began writing to newspapers
during his reign of terror in New York City, was more of an
assassin personality than a typical serial killer. Over almost
exactly a year—from July 1976 to July 1977—six young men
and women were killed and more were wounded, all parked in
lovers’ lanes, all shot in their cars with a powerful handgun.
Like a number of serial killers, Berkowitz was the product of
an adopted family, which he didn’t know until about the time he
was in the Army. He’d wanted to be sent to Vietnam, but ended
up in Korea, where he had his first sexual encounter, with a
prostitute, and contracted gonorrhea. When he got out of the
service and went back to New York City, he began hunting for
his biological mother, whom he found living with her daughter
—his sister—in Long Beach, Long Island. Much to his surprise
and dismay, they wanted nothing to do with him. He’d been shy,
insecure, and angry, and now he blossomed into a potential
killer. He’d learned how to shoot in the Army, He went to Texas
and procured a Charter Arms Bulldog—a .44-caliber handgun—
a large, powerful weapon that made him feel bigger and more
powerful. He went out into the city dumps of New York and
practiced with this weapon, hitting small targets until he was a
good shot. And then this low-level postal employee by day went
on the hunt by night.
We interviewed Berkowitz in Attica State Prison, where he
was serving twenty-five years to life for each of six killings after
pleading guilty, though he later came to deny his crimes. He had
been the victim of a near-fatal attack in prison in 1979, when his
throat had been slashed from behind. e wound required fiftysix stitches and the attacker was never identified. So we came to
him unannounced, not wanting to place him in further jeopardy.
With the warden’s cooperation, we had filled out most of our
written questionnaire in advance, so we were well prepped.
For this particular encounter, I brought along some visual
aids. As I mentioned, my father had been a pressman in New
York and head of the printers’ union in Long Island and had
supplied me with tabloids proclaiming the Son of Sam’s exploits
in large headlines.
I hold up the New York Daily News, then pass it across the
table to him as I say, “David, a hundred years from now no one
is going to remember Bob Ressler or John Douglas, but they will
remember the Son of Sam. In fact, right now there’s a case in
Wichita, Kansas, a guy who’s killed about half a dozen women
and calling himself the BTK Strangler. at’s ‘bind, torture, kill.’
And you know, he’s writing letters and he’s talking about you in
those letters. He talks about David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam.
He wants to be like you because you have this power. I wouldn’t
even be surprised if he writes you a letter in jail here.”
Berkowitz is not what I would call a charismatic guy, and he
was always searching for some bit of recognition or personal
achievement. He had bright blue eyes that were always trying to
pick out if someone was genuinely interested, or laughing at him.
When he heard what I had to say, his eyes lit up.
“Now you never had a chance to testify in court,” I continue,
“so all the public knows about you is that you’re one bad son of a
bitch. But from doing these interviews, we know that there must
be another side, a sensitive side, a side that was affected by your
background. And we want you to have the opportunity to tell us
about that.”
He’s pretty emotionally undemonstrative, but he speaks to us
with little hesitation. He admits having started more than two
thousand fires in the Brooklyn-Queens area, which he
documented in meticulous diary notes. at’s one way he
resembles an assassin personality—a loner who indulges in this
obsessive journal writing. Another is that he doesn’t want to have
any physical contact with the victim. He’s not a rapist or fetishist.
He’s not looking for souvenirs. Whatever sexual charge he’s
getting is from the act of shooting itself.
e fires he set were mainly of the nuisance variety, such as in
trash cans or abandoned buildings. Like a lot of arsonists, he
would masturbate while watching the flames, then again when
the fire department came to put them out. e fire-starting also
fits in with the other two elements of the “homicidal triad”: bedwetting and cruelty to animals.
I always thought of the prison interviews as like panning for
gold. e vast majority of what you get is going to be worthless
pebbles, but if you get one real nugget out of it, the effort has
been well worth it. And that was certainly the case with David
Berkowitz.
What’s very, very interesting to us is that as he’s stalking these
lovers’ lane areas, rather than go to the driver’s side of the car—
most frequently the male side—which would represent the
greater threat, he shifts around to the passenger side. is tells us
that, as he’s firing into that vehicle in a typical police stance, his
hatred, his anger, is directed at the woman. e multiple shots,
like multiple stab wounds, indicate the degree of that anger. e
male is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. ere’s
probably never any eye contact between attacker and victim.
Everything is done from a distance. He could possess his fantasy
woman without ever having to personalize her.
Equally interesting, another golden nugget that has become
part of our general awareness of serial killers, is that Berkowitz
told us he was on the hunt nightly. When he could not find a
victim of opportunity, a victim who was going to be at the wrong
place at the wrong time, he would go back to areas where he’d
been successful in the past. He would go back to a crime-scene
area (many of the others went back to body-disposal areas), and
the grave sites, and symbolically roll in the dirt and relive that
fantasy over and over again.
is is the same reason why other serial killers take
photographs or make videotapes of their crimes. Once the victim
is dead and the body has been disposed of, they want to be able
to relive the thrill, continue acting out the fantasy, do it again
and again. Berkowitz didn’t need the jewelry or the underwear or
the body parts or any other souvenir. He told us that just going
back was enough for him. He would then go back home,
masturbate, and relive the fantasy.
We would use this insight to great effect. People in law
enforcement had always speculated that killers returned to the
scenes of their crimes, but couldn’t prove it or explain exactly
why they did. From subjects like Berkowitz, we were starting to
discover that the speculation was true, though not always for the
reasons we might have suspected. Remorse can certainly be one
of them. But as Berkowitz showed us, there can be others. Once
you understand why a particular type of criminal might revisit
the scene, you can begin planning strategies to deal with him.
e Son of Sam name came from a crudely written note
addressed to police captain Joseph Borelli, who later went on to
become NYPD chief of detectives. It was found near the car of
victims Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani in the Bronx. Like
the others, both were killed from point-blank range. e note
read:
I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman-hater. I
am not. But I am a monster. I am the “son of Sam.” I am
a little brat.
When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats
his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the
house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves
to drink blood.
“Go out and kill,” commands father Sam.
Behind our house some rest. Mostly young—raped
and slaughtered—their blood drained—just bones now.
Pap Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can’t get
out but I look out the attic window and watch the world
go by.
I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength
then everybody else—programmed too kill.
However, to stop me you must kill me. Attention all
police: Shoot me first—shoot to kill or else keep out of
my way or you will die!
Papa Sam is old now He needs some blood to preserve
his youth. He has had too many heart attacks. “Ugh, me
hoot, it hurts, sonny boy,”
I miss my pretty princess most of all. She’s resting in
our ladies house. But i’ll see her soon.
I am the “monster”—“Beelzebub”—the chubby
behemouth.
I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair
game—tasty meat. e wemon of Queens are prettyist of
all. I must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt—
my life. Blood for papa.
Mr. Borelli, sir, I don’t want to kill any more. No sur,
no more but I must, “honour thy father.”
I want to make love to the world. I love people. I don’t
belong on earth. Return me to yahoos.
To the people of Queens, I love you. And i want to
wish all of you a happy Easter. May God bless you in this
life and in the next. And for now I say goodbye and
goodnight.
POLICE: Let me haunt you with these words:
I’ll be back!
I’ll be back!
To be interrpreted as—bang, bang, bang, bang—ugh!!
Yours in murder
Mr. Monster.
is insignificant nobody had become a national celebrity.
More than a hundred detectives joined what came to be known
as Task Force Omega. e wild, raving communications
continued, including letters to newspapers and journalists such as
columnist Jimmy Breslin. e city was in terror. At the post
office, he told us, he got a real thrill overhearing people talking
about the Son of Sam and not knowing they were in the same
room with him.
e next attack took place in Bayside, Queens, but both the
man and woman survived. Five days later, a couple in Brooklyn
were not so lucky. Stacy Moskowitz was killed instantly. Robert
Violante survived, but lost his sight from his wounds.
e Son of Sam was finally caught because he parked his Ford
Galaxy too close to a fire hydrant the night of the final murder. A
witness in the area remembered seeing an officer writing up a
ticket, and when it was traced, it led to David Berkowitz. When
confronted by police, he said simply, “Well, you got me.”
After his arrest, Berkowitz explained that “Sam” referred to his
neighbor, Sam Carr, whose black Labrador retriever, Harvey, was
apparently a three-thousand-year-old demon who commanded
David to kill. At one point, he actually shot the dog with a .22
pistol, but it survived. He was instantly labeled a paranoid
schizophrenic by much of the psychiatric community, with all
sorts of interpretations being given to his various letters. e
“pretty princess” of his first letter was apparently one of his
victims, Donna Lauria, whose soul Sam had promised him after
her death.
What was most significant to me about the letters, more than
any of the content, is the way his handwriting changes. In the
first letter, it is neat and orderly, then progressively degrades until
it is almost illegible. e misspellings become more and more
common. It is as if two different people had been writing the
letters. I showed this to him. He hadn’t even realized it. If I were
profiling him, as soon as I saw the degradation of the
handwriting, I would know he was vulnerable, prime to slip up,
to make some petty mistake, like parking in front of a fire
hydrant, that would help police catch him. at vulnerable point
would be the time to launch some sort of proactive strategy.
e reason Berkowitz opened up to us, I believe, was because
of the extensive homework we’d done on the case. Early on in the
interview, we came to the topic of this three-thousand-year-old
dog that made him do it. e psychiatric community had
accepted the story as gospel and thought it explained his
motivation. But I knew that that story hadn’t actually emerged
until after his arrest. It was his way out. So when he started
spouting about this dog, I said simply, “Hey, David, knock off
the bullshit. e dog had nothing to do with it.”
He laughed and nodded and admitted I was right. We’d read
several long psychological dissertations on the letters. One
compared him to the character of Jerry in Edward Albee’s play
e Zoo Story. Another tried to pick up his psychopathology by
analyzing the writing word by word. But David was throwing
them all a curve, which they swung at and missed.
e simple fact is that David Berkowitz was angry about how
he had been treated by his mother and other women in his life
and felt inadequate around them. His fantasy of possessing them
blossomed into a deadly reality. e important things to us were
the details.
•••
With Bob Ressler’s skillful administration of the NIJ grant and
Ann Burgess’s compilation of the interviews, by 1983 we had
completed a detailed study of thirty-six individuals. We also
collected data from 118 of their victims, primarily women.
Out of the study came a system to better understand and
classify violent offenders. For the first time, we could really begin
to link what was going on in a perpetrator’s mind to the evidence
he left at a crime scene. at, in turn, helped us to hunt them
more efficiently and catch and prosecute them more effectively. It
began to address some of the age-old questions about insanity
and “what type of person could do such a thing?”
In 1988, we expanded our conclusions into a book, entitled
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, published by Lexington
Books. At this writing, it is in its seventh printing. But regardless
of how much we learned, as we admitted in our conclusion, “this
study raises far more questions than it answers.”
e journey into the mind of the violent offender remains an
ongoing quest of discovery. Serial killers are, by definition,
“successful” killers, who learn from their experience. We’ve just
got to make sure we keep learning faster than they do.
8
e Killer Will Have a Speech
Impediment
Sometime in 1980 I saw an article in my local paper about an
elderly woman who was sexually assaulted and severely beaten by
an unknown intruder and left for dead, along with her two dogs,
which had been stabbed to death. It looked to the police as
though the offender had spent a fair amount of time at the scene.
e community was stunned and outraged.
A couple of months later, coming back from a road trip, I
happened to ask Pam if there had been any news on that case.
She told me there hadn’t been, and that there were no strong
suspects. I commented that that was too bad, because from what
I’d read and heard, it sounded like a solvable case. It wasn’t a
federal jurisdiction, and we hadn’t been asked in, but just as a
local resident, I decided to see if there was anything I could do.
I went down to the police station, introduced myself, told the
chief what I did, and asked if I could talk to the detectives
working the case. He accepted my offer graciously.
e lead detective’s name was Dean Martin. I can’t remember
if I refrained from any Jerry Lewis jokes, but I probably didn’t.
He showed me the case files, including the crime-scene photos.
is woman had really been pummeled. And as I studied the
materials, I started getting a clear mental picture of the offender
and the dynamics of the crime.
“Okay,” I said to the detectives, who were politely, if
somewhat skeptically, listening to me, “here’s what I think.” It’s a
sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school kid. Whenever we see
an old victim of a sexual assault, we look for a young offender,
someone unsure of himself. without much or any experience. A
victim any younger, stronger, or more challenging would be too
intimidating to him. He’ll be disheveled-looking, he’ll have
scruffy hair, generally poorly groomed. Now what happened on
this particular night was his mother or father kicked him out of
the house and he had no place to go. He’s not going to go too far
in this situation. Instead, he’s going to look for the closest and
easiest shelter he can find. He doesn’t have the kind of
relationship with any girl or other guys that he can just crash at
their house until the storm at home blows over. But as he’s out
wandering, feeling miserable, powerless, and angry about it, he
comes to this lady’s house. He knows she lives alone, he’s worked
there in the past or done some odd jobs for her. He knows she
isn’t much of a threat.
So he breaks in, maybe she protests, maybe she starts yelling
at him, maybe she’s just terrified. Whatever her reaction, that
both inflames and empowers him. He wants to show himself and
the world what a man he is. He attempts sex with her, but he
can’t penetrate. So he beats the hell out of her, at a certain point
deciding he’d better go all the way because she can identify him.
He isn’t wearing a mask; this has been an impulse crime, not a
planned one. But she’s so traumatized that even though she lives,
she can’t give the police any description.
After the attack, he’s still got no place to go, and she certainly
isn’t threatening him, he knows she won’t get any visitors at
night, so he stays and eats and drinks, because by this point he’s
hungry,
I pause in my narrative and tell them there’s someone who
meets this description out there. If they can find him, they’ve got
their offender.
One detective looks at another. One of them starts to smile.
“Are you a psychic, Douglas?”
“No,” I say, “but my job would be a lot easier if I were.”
“Because we had a psychic, Beverly Newton, in here a couple
of weeks ago, and she said just about the same things.”
What’s more, my description did fit someone who lived
nearby, whom they’d briefly considered. After our meeting, they
interviewed him again. ere wasn’t enough evidence to hold
him, and they couldn’t get a confession. Shortly after that, he left
the area.
e chief and detectives wanted to know how, if I wasn’t a
psychic, I could come up with such a specific scenario. Part of
the answer is that, by that time, I had seen enough cases of
violent crime against all types of people, had correlated enough
details with each one, and had interviewed enough violent
offenders that I had a pattern in my mind of what sort of crime is
committed by what sort of person. But, of course, if it were that
straightforward, we could teach profiling from a manual or offer
the police a computer program that could come up with a list of
suspect characteristics for any set of inputs. And the fact of the
matter is that while we use computers a lot in our work and they
are capable of some impressive things, some other more complex
things they simply can’t do and may never be able to do. Profiling
is like writing. You can give a computer all the rules of grammar
and syntax and style, but it still can’t write the book.
What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I
have to work with—the case reports, the crime-scene photos and
descriptions, the victim statements or autopsy protocols—and
then put myself mentally and emotionally in the head of the
offender. I try to think as he does. Exactly how this happens, I’m
not sure, any more than the novelists such as Tom Harris who’ve
consulted me over the years can say exactly how their characters
come to life. If there is a psychic component to this, I won’t run
away from it, though I regard it more in the realm of creative
thinking.
Psychics can, on occasion, be helpful to a criminal
investigation. I’ve seen it work. Some of them have the ability to
focus subconsciously on particular subtle details at a scene and
draw logical conclusions from them, just as I try to do and train
my people to do. But I always advise investigators that a psychic
should be a last resort as an investigative tool, and if you’re going
to use one, don’t expose him or her to officers or detectives who
know the details of the case. Because good psychics are proficient
at picking up small, nonverbal clues, and the psychic could
amaze you and establish credibility by giving back to you facts of
the case you already know without necessarily having any
particular insight into what you don’t know but want to find out.
In the Atlanta child murders, hundreds of psychics showed up in
the city and offered their services to the police. ey came up
with all sorts of descriptions of killers and methods. As it turned
out, none was even close.
Around the same time that I met with the local police,
departments from around the San Francisco Bay area called me
in on a series of murders in heavily wooded areas along hiking
paths they had linked together and attributed to an UNSUB the
press had dubbed the “Trailside Killer.”
It had started in August of 1979 when Edda Kane, an athletic,
forty-four-year-old bank executive, disappeared while on a
solitary hike up the east peak of Mount Tamalpais, a beautiful
mountain overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San
Francisco Bay, which was known by the nickname the “Sleeping
Lady.” When Kane wasn’t home by dark, her worried husband
called the police. Her body was found by a search-team dog the
next afternoon, naked except for one sock, facedown, in a
kneeling position as if begging for her life. e medical examiner
determined cause of death to be a single bullet to the back of the
head. ere was no evidence of sexual assault. e killer took
three credit cards and $10 in cash, but left her wedding ring and
other jewelry.
e following March, the body of twenty-three-year-old
Barbara Schwartz was found in Mount Tamalpais Park. She had
been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, also apparently while
kneeling. In October, twenty-six-year-old Anne Alderson didn’t
return from her jog around the fringes of the park. Her body was
found the next afternoon with a bullet wound in the right side of
her head. Unlike previous victims, Alderson was fully clothed,
faceup, propped against a rock with only her right gold earring
missing. e live-in caretaker on Mount Tamalpais, John Henry,
said he had seen her sitting alone in the park’s amphitheater on
what was to be the last morning of her life, watching the sun
come up. Two other witnesses had seen her less than half a mile
from where Edda Kane’s body had been found.
A promising suspect was Mark McDermand, whose invalid
mother and schizophrenic brother had been found shot to death
in their cabin on Mount Tamalpais. After eleven days as a
fugitive, McDermand surrendered to Marin County detective
Capt. Robert Gaddini. Detectives were able to link him to the
murders of his own family, but while he was heavily armed, none
of his guns matched the .44- or .38-caliber weapons used in the
Trailside cases. And then the killings resumed.
In November, Shauna May, twenty-five, failed to meet up
with two hiking companions in Point Reyes Park, a few miles
north of San Francisco. Two days later, searchers found her body
in a shallow grave near the decomposing corpse of another hiker,
twenty-two-year-old Diana O’Connell, a New Yorker who had
disappeared in the park a month before. Both women had been
shot in the head. e same day, two other bodies were discovered
in the park, identified as belonging to nineteen-year-old Richard
Stowers and his eighteen-year-old fiancée, Cynthia Moreland,
both of whom had been missing since mid-October. Investigators
determined they had been killed the same long Columbus Day
weekend as Anne Alderson.
e early murders had already sent terror through hikers in
the area and prompted signs advising people, especially women,
not to go into the woods alone. But with the discovery of four
bodies in a single day, all hell broke loose. Marin County sheriff
G. Albert Howenstein Jr. had collected several eyewitness
accounts of people having seen the victims with strange men just
before their deaths, but on certain key points, such as age and
facial features, the descriptions conflicted with each other. is,
by the way, isn’t unusual even in a single murder, much less a
multiple over several months. An unusual pair of bifocals was
found at the Barbara Schwartz scene, which apparently belonged
to the killer. Howenstein released information on the glasses and
the prescription, sending out flyers to all the optometrists in the
area. e frames were of apparent prison issue, so Captain
Gaddini contacted the California State Department of Justice to
try to identify all recently released offenders with a history of sex
crimes against women. Various jurisdictions and agencies,
including the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office, were now actively
working the case.
ere was speculation in the press that the Trailside Killer
might, in fact, be Los Angeles’ Zodiac Killer, who remained an
UNSUB but who had been inactive since 1969. Perhaps Zodiac
had been in prison for some other crime all this time and had
been released by unknowing corrections officials. But unlike
Zodiac, the Trailside Killer felt no need to taunt police or
communicate with them.
Sheriff Howenstein brought in a psychologist from Napa, Dr.
R. William Mathis, to analyze the case. Noting the ritualistic
aspects of the cases, Dr. Mathis said he would expect the offender
to keep souvenirs, and anyone identified as a suspect should be
followed for a week before being arrested in the hope that he
might lead police to the murder weapon or other evidence. As far
as his appearance and behavioral characteristics, Mathis described
a handsome man with a winning personality.
Working on Mathis’s advice, Howenstein and Gaddini set
various types of proactive traps, including having male park
rangers pose as female hikers, but nothing was working. e
public pressure on law enforcement was intense. e sheriff
announced to the public that the killer lays in wait for his victims
and puts them through psychological trauma before killing them,
probably making them plead for their lives.
When the Bureau’s San Rafael Resident Agency asked for
assistance from Quantico, they’d originally contacted Roy
Hazelwood, who was our chief expert on rape and violence
against women. Roy is a sensitive, caring guy, and the case
affected him deeply. I remember him describing it to me as we
walked back to our office suite from the classroom building,
where he had just finished teaching a National Academy class. I
almost got the sense Roy felt personally responsible, as if the
combined efforts of the FBI and about ten cooperating local
agencies weren’t enough; that he should be cracking the case and
bringing the offender to justice.
Unlike me, Roy had full-time teaching responsibilities. I had
given up most of my classroom work by this point and was the
Behavioral Science Unit’s only full-time profiler actively working
cases. So Roy asked me to go out to San Francisco and give the
police there some on-the-scene input.
As we’ve noted earlier, there is often resentment when the FBI
comes into a case. Some of this is left over from the Hoover days,
when it was often felt that the Bureau would just move in and
take over the investigation of high-profile crimes. My unit can’t
come in unless we’re asked by whichever agency has primary
jurisdiction, be it a local police department or even the FBI itself.
But in Trailside, the Marin County Sheriff’s Department had
brought in the Bureau early, and with the kind of play the cases
were getting in the media, I frankly felt they welcomed someone
like me to come in and take the heat off them, at least for a
while.
At the sheriff’s department offices, I reviewed all the case
materials and crime-scene photos. I was particularly interested in
Marin detective sergeant Rich Keaton’s observations that the
murders all seemed to have taken place at secluded, heavily
wooded sites with a thick canopy of foliage blocking out most of
the sky. None of these areas was accessible by car, only by foot,
involving at least a mile’s hike. e scene of Anne Alderson’s
murder was reasonably close to a service road that represented a
shortcut from the park amphitheater. is all strongly suggested
to me that the killer was a local, intimately familiar with the area.
I gave my presentation in a large training room at the Marin
County Sheriff’s Department. Seats were banked in a semicircle,
like a medical lecture hall. Of the fifty or sixty people in the
room, about ten were FBI agents, the rest police officers and
detectives. As I looked out over the heads of the audience, I
noticed more than a few gray hairs—experienced veterans had
been brought back from retirement to help catch this guy,
e first thing I did was challenge the profile that had already
been given. I didn’t think we were dealing with a good-looking,
charming, sophisticated type. e multiple stabbings and blitzstyle attacks from the rear told me we were dealing with an
asocial type (though not necessarily antisocial) who’d be
withdrawn, unsure of himself, and unable to engage his victims
in conversation, develop a good line, or con or coax or trick them
into doing what he wanted. e hikers were all physically fit. e
blitz attack was a clear indication to me that the only way he
could control his intended victim was to devastate her before she
could respond.
ese were not the crimes of someone who knew his victims.
e sites were secluded and protected from view, which meant
the killer essentially had as much time as he wanted to act out his
fantasy with each victim. Yet he still felt the need for a blitz
attack. ere was no rape, just handling of the bodies after death;
masturbation, probably, but no intercourse. e victims were a
range of ages and physical types, unlike those of a glib,
sophisticated killer such as Ted Bundy, most of whose victims
conformed to a single image: pretty college-age women with
long, dark hair, parted in the middle. e Trailside Killer was
nonpreferential, like a spider waiting for a bug to fly into his
web. I told the assembled group of officers I expected this guy to
have a bad background. I agreed with Captain Gaddini that he
had spent time in jail. Priors might include rapes or, more likely,
rape attempts, but no murders before this series. ere would
have been some precipitating stressor before it began. I certainly
expected him to be white since all the victims were, and I
thought he’d have some blue-collar mechanical or industrial job.
Because of the efficiency of the murders and his success in
evading the police thus far, I pegged his age at low to midthirties. I also thought he’d be pretty bright. If they ever tested
his IQ, it would be well above normal. And if they looked into
his background, they’d find a history of bed-wetting, fire-starting,
and cruelty to animals, or at least two of the three.
“Another thing,” I added after a pregnant pause, “the killer
will have a speech impediment.”
It wasn’t hard to read the expressions or body language in the
room. ey were finally expressing what they’d probably been
thinking all along: this guy’s full of shit!
“What makes you say that?” one cop asked sarcastically, “e
wounds look like a ‘stutter stab’ to you?” He grinned at his own
“discovery” of a new method of killing.
No, I explained, it was a combination of inductive and
deductive reasoning, considering just about every other factor in
the cases; all of the factors I’d already been through. e secluded
locations where he wasn’t likely to come in contact with anyone
else, the fact that none of the victims had been approached in a
crowd or tricked into going along with him, the fact that he felt
he had to rely on a blitz attack even in the middle of nowhere—
all of this told me we were dealing with someone with some
condition he felt awkward or ashamed about. Overpowering an
unsuspecting victim and being able to dominate and control her
was his way of overcoming this handicap.
It could be some other type of ailment or disability, I allowed.
Psychologically or behaviorally speaking, it could be a very
homely individual, someone with bad acne scarring, polio, a
missing limb, anything like that. But with the kind of attack we’d
seen, we had to rule out a missing limb or any serious crippling
condition. And with all the various witness accounts and all of
the people in the parks around the time of the murders, we
would have expected to hear about someone with an obvious
disfigurement. A speech impediment, on the other hand, was
something that the UNSUB could easily feel ashamed of or
uncomfortable with to the extent that it might limit normal
social relationships, yet wouldn’t “stand out” in a crowd. No one
would know about it until he opened his mouth.
Giving this kind of guidance to a roomful of seasoned cops
with a lot at stake and the press and public breathing down their
necks is definitely a high ass-pucker situation, the kind I like to
create for the people I’m interrogating but would just as soon
avoid myself. You can’t completely do that, though. You’re always
haunted by the thought so clearly stated by one of the detectives
in the room that afternoon:
“What if you’re wrong, Douglas?”
“I may be wrong about some things,” I conceded as truthfully
as I could. “I may miss the age. I may miss the occupation or the
IQ. But I’m certainly not going to miss the race or the sex, and
I’m not going to miss that he’s blue collar. And in this particular
case, I’m not going to miss that he has some kind of defect that
really bothers him. Maybe it’s not a speech impediment, but I
think it is.”
When I was finished, I couldn’t tell how much of an impact
I’d had or whether any of this had sunk in. But one cop did
come up to me afterward and say, “I don’t know whether you’re
right or wrong, John, but at least you gave the investigation some
direction.” at’s always good to hear, though you tend to hold
your breath until you see what that investigation ultimately turns
up. I went back to Quantico and the combined Bay Area sheriff
and police departments went about their work.
On March 29, the killer struck again, this time shooting a
young couple in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Santa
Cruz. When he told Ellen Marie Hansen, a twenty-year-old
sophomore at the University of California—Davis, that he was
going to rape her, she protested, whereupon he opened fire with a
.38 pistol, killing her outright and severely wounding Steven
Haertle, whom he left for dead. But Haertle was able to provide a
partial description of a man with crooked, yellow teeth. Police
built on this with other witnesses and were able to tie such a man
to a red, late-model foreign car, possibly a Fiat, though again, this
description varied considerably from previous ones. Haertle
thought the subject was in his fifties or sixties and balding.
Ballistics linked these shootings to previous Trailside murders.
On May 1, pretty, blond, twenty-year-old Heather Roxanne
Scaggs disappeared. She was a student at a printing trade school
in San Jose, and her boyfriend, mother, and roommate all
recalled she said she was going out with an industrial arts teacher
at the school, David Carpenter, who had arranged for her to buy
a car from a friend of his. Carpenter was fifty years of age, which
was unusual for a crime of this type.
From that point on, things began falling into place and the
net began closing. Carpenter drove a red Fiat with a dented
tailpipe. is last detail was a piece of “hold-back” information
the police hadn’t let out previously.
David Carpenter should have been identified and caught
before he actually was. e fact is, he was incredibly lucky and
had also involved multiple police jurisdictions, which
complicated the manhunt. He had an incarceration record for sex
crimes. Ironically, the reason he didn’t show up as a sex offender
on state parole records was that he had been released by
California to serve out a federal sentence, and though on the
streets, he was still technically in federal custody. So he slipped
through the cracks. Another irony was that Carpenter and his
second victim, Barbara Schwartz, at whose murder scene his
glasses had been found, shared the same optometrist!
Unfortunately, he had not seen the flyer the sheriff’s department
circulated.
Other witnesses came forward, including an older woman
who had recognized the composite drawing on television and
said he had been the purser on a ship she and her children had
taken to Japan twenty years before. e man had given her “the
creeps” with the inappropriate attention he continually paid her
young daughter.
And Peter Berest, the manager of the Glen Park Continental
Savings and Loan branch in Daly City, recalled his pretty,
sensitive, and trusting part-time teller, high school student Anna
Kelly Menjivar, who had disappeared from her home late the
previous December. ough she had not previously been linked
to the Trailside slayings, her body had also been found in Mount
Tamalpais Park. Berest remembered how kind and sweet Anna
had been to the regular customer with a severe stutter whom
Berest later learned had been arrested in 1960 for attacking a
young woman at the Presidio, the Army installation at the north
tip of San Francisco.
San Jose police and the FBI put Carpenter under surveillance
and eventually arrested him. He turned out to be the product of
a domineering and physically abusive mother, and at least an
emotionally abusive father, a child of well above average
intelligence who was picked on because of his severe stuttering.
His childhood was also marked by chronic bed-wetting and
cruelty to animals. In adult life, his anger and frustration turned
into fits of unpredictable, violent rage and a seemingly
unquenchable sex drive.
e first crime for which he was caught and served time, the
attack on a woman with a knife and hammer in the Presidio,
came following the birth of a child into an already strained
marriage. During the brutal assault and shortly before, the victim
reported, his terrible stutter was gone.
•••
Because of all the requests that had been coming in from
National Academy graduates, FBI director William Webster had
given the Behavioral Science instructors official approval to offer
psychological profiling consultation back in 1978. By the early
1980s the service had become extremely popular. I was working
cases full-time, and instructors such as Bob Ressler and Roy
Hazelwood were consulting as their teaching duties allowed. But
despite the fact that we felt good about what we were doing and
the results we thought we were achieving, no one at the top really
knew for sure if this was an effective use of Bureau resources and
manpower. So in 1981, the FBI’s Institutional Research and
Development Unit—then headed by Howard Teten, who had
moved over from Behavioral Science—undertook the first indepth cost-benefit study of what was then called simply the
Psychological Profiling Program. Teten, whose informal
consultations had begun the program almost by accident, was
interested to see if it was really having any effect and if
headquarters should continue it.
A questionnaire was developed and sent to our clients—
officials and detectives at any law enforcement agency that had
used our profiling services. ese included city, county, and state
police departments, sheriff’s departments, FBI field offices,
highway patrols, and state investigative agencies. While most of
the requests had had to do with murder investigations, the R&D
Unit also compiled data on our consultation in rapes,
kidnappings, extortion, threats, child molestation, hostage
situations, and accidental-death and suicide determination.
Profiling was still a hazy and hard-to-evaluate notion to many
people within the Bureau. A lot considered it witchcraft or black
magic, and some of the rest thought of it as window dressing. So
we knew that unless the study showed strong and verifiable
successes, all of the nonteaching facets of the Behavioral Science
Unit could go by the board.
We were therefore both gratified and relieved when the
analysis came back in December 1981. Investigators from all over
the country came through enthusiastically for us, urging that the
program be continued. e final paragraph of the report’s
covering letter sums it up:
e evaluation reveals that the program is actually more
successful than any of us really realized. e Behavioral
Science Unit is to be commended for their outstanding
job.
e detectives generally agreed that the area in which we were
the most helpful was in narrowing down lists of suspects and
directing the investigation into a tighter focus. An example was
the brutal and appallingly senseless killing of Francine Elveson in
the Bronx in October 1979, not far from some of David
Berkowitz’s haunts. In fact there was concern on the part of
NYPD that a Son of Sam devotee might be using his hero for
inspiration. We teach the case at Quantico because it’s a good
model of just how we came up with a profile and how the police
used it to push forward a baffling and long-unsolved murder.
Francine Elveson was a twenty-six-year-old teacher of
handicapped children at a local day-care center. Weighing ninety
pounds and standing less than five foot tall, she brought a rare
empathy and sensitivity to her students, being mildly
handicapped herself with kyphoscoliosis, or curvature of the
spine. Shy and not very socially oriented, she lived with her
parents in the Pelham Parkway House apartments.
She had left for work as usual at six-thirty in the morning.
About eight-twenty, a fifteen-year-old boy who also lived in the
building found her wallet in the stairwell between the third and
fourth floors. He had no time to do anything with it and still be
on time for school, so he kept it until he came home for lunch,
then gave it to his father. e father went to the Elveson
apartment a little before three that afternoon and gave the wallet
to Francine’s mother, who then called the day-care center to let
Francine know her wallet had been found. Mrs. Elveson was told
her daughter had not shown up for work that day. Instantly
alarmed, she and her other daughter and a neighbor began a
search of the building.
On the roof landing at the top of the stairwell, they came
upon a sight of overwhelming horror. Francine’s nude body had
been severely beaten by blunt-force trauma, so severely that the
medical examiner later found that her jaw, nose, and cheeks had
been fractured and her teeth loosened. She had been spreadeagled and tied with her own belt and nylon stockings around
her wrists and ankles, though the medical examiner determined
she was already dead when that was done. Her nipples had been
cut off after death and placed on her chest. Her underpants had
been pulled over her head to cover her face, and bite marks were
on her thighs and knees. e several lacerations on the body, all
of them shallow, suggested a small penknife. Her umbrella and
pen had been forced into her vagina, and her comb was placed in
her pubic hair. Her earrings had been placed on the ground
symmetrically on either side of her head. e cause of death was
determined to be ligature strangulation with the strap of the
victim’s own pocketbook. On her thigh the killer had scrawled,
“You can’t stop me,” and on her stomach he had written, “Fuck
you,” both with the pen that had been inserted into her vagina.
e other significant feature of the scene was that the killer had
defecated near the body and covered the excrement with some of
Francine’s clothing.
One of the things Mrs. Elveson told the police was that a gold
pendant in the form of the Hebrew letter chai, for good luck, was
missing from around Francine’s neck. When the mother
described the shape of the pendant, detectives realized her body
had been ceremonially positioned to replicate it.
Traces of semen were found on her body, but DNA typing
was unknown to forensic science back in 1979. ere were no
defense wounds on the hands or blood traces or skin fragments
under fingernails, which suggested there had been no struggle.
e only tangible piece of forensic evidence was a single African
American hair found on the body during the autopsy.
Upon examining the scene and establishing the known facts,
homicide detectives determined that the initial attack took place
as Francine walked down the stairs. After she was battered
unconscious, she was carried up to the roof landing. e autopsy
indicated that she hadn’t been raped.
Because of its horrible nature, the case attracted a tremendous
amount of public attention and media coverage. A police task
force of twenty-six detectives was assembled, which questioned
more than two thousand potential witnesses and suspects and
checked on all known sex offenders in the New York City
metropolitan area. But after a month, the investigation didn’t
seem to be going anywhere.
Figuring there was no harm in getting another opinion, New
York Housing Authority detective Tom Foley and Lt. Joe
D’Amico contacted us at Quantico. ey came down, bringing
files and reports, crime-scene photos, and autopsy protocols. Roy
Hazelwood, Dick Ault, Tony Rider (who would go on to become
chief of the Behavioral Science Unit), and I met with them in the
executive dining room.
After going over all the evidence and case materials and trying
to place myself in the shoes of both the victim and the attacker, I
came up with a profile. I suggested that the police seek an
average-looking white male between the ages of twenty-five and
thirty-five, probably right around thirty, who would be
disheveled in appearance, unemployed, and mainly nocturnal,
live within a half mile of the building with his parents or older
female relative, be single and have no relationships with women
and no close friends, be a high school or college dropout with no
military experience, have low self-esteem, and not own a car or
hold a driver’s license, who was currently or had been in a mental
institution taking prescription medication, had attempted suicide
by strangulation or asphyxia, was not a drug or alcohol abuser,
and who would have a large collection of bondage and S&M
pornography. is would be his first murder, in fact his first
serious crime, but unless he was caught, not his last.
“You don’t have to go far for this killer,” I told the
investigators. “And you’ve already talked to the guy.” ey would
already have interviewed him and members of his family, since
they lived in the area. Police would find him cooperative,
probably overly so. He might even seek them out, injecting
himself into the investigation to make sure it didn’t get too close
to him.
To a lot of people unfamiliar with our techniques, this seemed
like a lot of hocus-pocus. But if you go through it methodically,
you can begin to see how we come up with our impressions and
recommendations.
e first thing we decided was that this was a crime of
opportunity, a spontaneous event. Francine’s parents told us that
she sometimes took the elevator and sometimes walked the stairs.
ere was no way to predict what her preference would be on
any given morning. If the killer had been lying in wait for her in
the stairwell, he might have missed her altogether and, in any
event, would likely have run into other people before seeing
Francine.
Everything used in the attack and on the victim’s body
belonged to the victim. e killer had brought nothing to the
scene, other than perhaps the small pocketknife. He had no
weapons or rape kit. He had not stalked her or gone to the scene
with the intention of committing the crime.
is, in turn, led us to the next conclusion. If the UNSUB
had not gone to the building with the intention of committing
this crime, he must have been there for some other reason. And
for him to have been there before 7 A.M. and to have run into
Francine on the stairwell, he must have either lived in the
building, worked there, or knew his way around pretty well. is
could have meant a mailman or telephone company or Con Ed
worker, though I thought that unlikely since we had no witness
reports, and someone in that situation would not have been able
to take the time he clearly spent with her. After the initial attack
on the stairs, he knew he could take her up to the roof landing
without much fear of being interrupted. Also, since no one in the
building saw anything or anyone unusual, he must have fit in.
Francine did not scream or struggle, so she probably knew him,
at least by sight, and no one noticed anyone strange or menacing
going into or out of the building that morning.
Because of the sexual nature of the attack, we felt confident
we were dealing with a man in her general age range. We stated
the range to be between twenty-five and thirty-five, probably
right around the middle. I was willing to rule out the fifteen-
year-old who found the wallet (as well as his forty-year-old
father) based solely on this. Based on my experience, I could not
imagine someone of that age treating the body this way. Even
Monte Rissell, an extremely “precocious” serial rapist, had not
behaved in this manner. is advanced a sexual fantasy would
take years to develop. Also, the fifteen-year-old was black.
Even though the examination of the body had turned up the
African American hair, I was convinced we were dealing with a
white killer. Very rarely did we see this type of crime cross racial
lines, and when we did, there was usually other evidence to
substantiate it. ere was none in this case, and I had seldom, if
ever, seen this kind of mutilation from a black subject. A black
former janitor in the building who had never returned his keys
was considered a good suspect, but I didn’t think it would be him
both because of this behavioral consideration and the fact that
some of the tenants would have been sure to notice him.
How did I account for that hair connecting the crime to a
black UNSUB? the police wanted to know. I couldn’t, which
made me somewhat uncomfortable, but I was still sure enough I
was right to stand by it.
is was a “high-risk” crime and a “low-risk” victim. She had
no boyfriends, was neither a prostitute, a drug taker, a beautiful
child in an open environment, nor was she in a bad
neighborhood away from home. e building was about 50
percent black, 40 percent white, and 10 percent Hispanic. No
other similar crimes had been reported here or anywhere else in
the neighborhood. Any attacker could have chosen a much
“safer” place to commit a sexual crime. is, combined with the
lack of advance preparation, pointed to a disorganized offender.
A combination of other factors, taken together, gave me an
even clearer picture of the type of person who had killed Francine
Elveson. ere had been rather horrible sexual mutilation and
masturbation over the body, but no intercourse. e penetration
with the umbrella and pen were acts of sexual substitution. Quite
clearly, the adult male we were looking for was an insecure,
sexually immature, and inadequate individual. e masturbation
suggested this was the acting out of some ritual he had been
fantasizing about for some time. e masturbatory fantasy would
have been fueled by rough bondage and sadomasochistic
pornography, also a hallmark of a sexually inadequate male.
Remember, he had tied her up after unconsciousness or death.
e choice of a small, physically frail victim who still had to be
blitz-attacked and neutralized quickly before he could perpetrate
his violent fantasies on her only confirmed this in my mind. Had
he carried out his sadistic acts on a living, conscious victim, it
would have been a different story as to personality. But as it was,
he would have a lot of difficulty maintaining relationships with
women. If he dated at all, which I doubted, he would seek out
much younger women whom he’d have a better shot at
dominating or controlling.
e fact that he had been hanging around the apartment
building when other people like Francine were on their way to
work told me he was not gainfully employed in a full-time job. If
he had any job at all, it would be a part-time one, possibly at
night, which didn’t pay him much.
From that I concluded that he would not be able to live on his
own. Unlike a lot of slicker types of killers, this guy would not be
fully able to hide his weirdness from peers, which would mean he
would not have many friends and wouldn’t live with a roommate.
He would probably be nocturnal and wouldn’t care much about
his appearance. Since he wouldn’t be living with friends and
could not afford a place of his own, he would be living with his
parents, or more likely, I felt, a single parent or older female
relative such as a sister or an aunt. He would not be able to afford
an automobile, which meant he either took public transportation
to the building, walked, or lived there. I didn’t see him taking a
bus to get there so early in the morning, which then suggested
that he lived in the building or within, say, a half mile.
en there was the placement of the various ritual objects—
the severed nipples, the earrings, the positioning of the body
itself. is type of compulsiveness amidst this frenzy of
disorganized mayhem told me my prey had some deep
psychological and psychiatric problems. I expected him to be on,
or at least to have been on, some kind of prescription
medication. at and the fact that the crime took place in early
morning indicated that alcohol wasn’t a factor with this person.
Whatever his instability or psychosis was, it was getting worse
and would have been noticeable to those around him. Previous
suicide attempts, particularly involving asphyxiation—the
method of killing he had used on Francine—were a good
possibility. I was betting he either was, or had been, in a mental
institution. I ruled out any military experience because of this
and thought he would be either a high school or college dropout
with a history of unfulfilled ambitions. I was reasonably sure this
was a first murder for this guy, but if he got away with it, it
wouldn’t be his last. I didn’t expect him to strike again right away.
is crime would be enough to hold him for weeks or months.
But eventually, when the circumstances were favorable and the
victim of opportunity again presented herself, he would strike
again. His messages written on the body told me that much.
His placing the victim in the degrading, ritualistic posture
told me he didn’t have much remorse about the crime. Had her
body been covered, I might have thought that placing her
underpants over her face was a sign that he was somewhat sorry
and wanted to leave her with some dignity, but that was negated
by the exposure of the body. So the covered face was more in the
line of depersonalizing and degrading her than any act of
concern.
Interestingly, he did use her clothing to cover up his own
feces. Had he defecated at the scene and left it exposed, this
could have been interpreted as part of his ritual fantasy or a
further sign of contempt for this victim in particular or for
women in general. But the fact that he covered it indicated either
that he was there a long time and had no place else to go or
couldn’t control his nerves or both. Based on previous experience,
I thought his inability to refrain from defecating at the scene
might also be the result of medication.
•••
After receiving the profile, the police went back over their
extensive suspect and interview list. ey tossed out one known
former sex offender who was now married with children. e
preliminary cut-down had twenty-two names on it, and of these,
one stood out as fitting the profile closely.
His name was Carmine Calabro. A thirty-year-old, white
unemployed actor, he lived off and on with his widowed father in
the Elvesons’ building, also on the fourth floor. He was
unmarried and reportedly had trouble maintaining relationships
with women. A high school dropout, he had no military
experience. When police searched his room, they found an
extensive collection of bondage and S&M pornography. He did
have a history of suicide attempts by hanging and asphyxia—
both before and after the Elveson murder.
But he had an alibi. As I’d predicted, the police had
interviewed his father, as they had every other tenant in the
building. Mr. Calabro had told them that Carmine was an inpatient resident at a local mental hospital undergoing treatment
for depression. is was why the police had ruled him out earlier.
But armed with the profile description, they immediately
went back to work on him and quickly determined how lax
security was at that particular institution. ey were then able to
establish conclusively that Carmine had been absent without
leave—he had simply walked out—the evening before Francine
Elveson’s murder.
irteen months after the murder, Carmine Calabro was
arrested and police got a dental impression from him. ree
forensic dentists then confirmed that his teeth matched the bite
marks on Francine’s body. is was to be key evidence in the
trial, at which Calabro pleaded not guilty and which ended with
a murder conviction and a sentence of twenty-five years to life.
e African American hair, by the way, turned out to be
unrelated. e medical examiner’s office did a careful procedural
investigation and discovered that the body bag used to transport
Francine Elveson’s body to the morgue had previously been used
for a black male victim and had not been properly cleaned out
between uses. But this does go to show that forensic evidence on
its own can be misleading, and if it doesn’t fit the investigator’s
overall impression of the case, it should be looked at carefully
before being accepted as proof.
is case was very gratifying to us, made even more gratifying
by the fact that we had made believers out of the people we
worked with in New York, among the sharpest and most
sophisticated law enforcement people in the business. For an
April 1983 article about the profiling program in Psychology
Today, Lieutenant D’Amico said, “ey had him so right that I
asked the FBI why they hadn’t given us his phone number, too.”
After that article appeared, Calabro wrote to us from the
Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, even
though his name and Elveson’s name never appeared in the
article. In a rambling letter with poor grammar and spelling, he
generally had complimentary things to say about the FBI and
NYPD, reasserted his innocence, grouped himself together with
David Berkowitz and George Metesky, the Mad Bomber, and
wrote, “I am not contradicting your profile of the killer in this
case, as a matter of fact, on two points, I sincerely believe you are
correct.”
He went on to ask if we had been informed of the presence of
hair evidence on the body, which he thought might exculpate
(my word, not his) him. en, curiously, he went on to ask when
we came up with the profile and whether we had all the evidence.
If we had all the evidence, then he intended to let the matter rest,
though if we didn’t, he would write us again.
I thought this letter might be an opening to allow us to
include Calabro in our study. So in July 1983, Bill Hagmaier and
Rosanne Russo, one of the first woman agents in the Behavioral
Science Unit, went up to Clinton to interview Calabro. ey
described him as being nervous but polite and cooperative, just
as he had been with the police. He focused quite heavily on his
innocence and the upcoming appeal, stating that he had been
unfairly convicted on the bite-mark evidence. As a result, he had
had all of his teeth removed so that “they cannot accuse me
again” and proudly displayed his empty mouth. Other than that,
the interview was in many ways a rehash of his letter, though
Hagmaier and Russo said he seemed quite interested in what
they were doing and didn’t want them to leave. Even in prison,
he remained a loner.
ere is no doubt in my mind that Carmine Calabro is deeply
psychologically disturbed. Nothing about his case, his
background, or our communication with him indicates anything
approaching normalcy. At the same time, I still believe that like
most disturbed individuals he understood the difference between
right and wrong. Having these bizarre and deranged fantasies is
not a crime. Making the willful choice to act upon them to the
harm of others most certainly is.
9
Walking in the Shoes
By this time in the early 1980s I was handling upward of 150
cases a year and was on the road an equal number of days. I was
starting to feel like Lucille Ball trying to get ahead of the
conveyor belt in the famous I Love Lucy candy factory skit—the
more stuff that came at me, the more frantically I had to
scramble to keep from falling behind. Actually getting ahead of
the game so I could take a moment to breathe was out of the
question.
As our work and results became known, requests for assistance
were pouring in from all over the United States and many foreign
countries. Like a triage officer in an emergency room, I had to
start prioritizing cases. Rape-murders where there appeared to be
a threat of further loss of life got my most immediate attention.
With cold cases or those where the UNSUB didn’t seem to be
active, I’d ask the police why they’d called us in. Sometimes the
victim’s family would be pressuring them for a solution. at was
certainly understandable and my heart always went out to them,
but I couldn’t afford to spend precious time on an analysis that
was just going to be shelved by the locals without any action.
With active cases, it was interesting to note where they came
from. In the early days of the program, anything from one of the
most major departments—say, NYPD or LAPD—would arouse
my suspicion as to why they’d come to our unit in Quantico at
all. Sometimes it was a jurisdictional feud with the FBI, such as
who gets the surveillance films, who’ll do the interrogation, and
who’ll prosecute a series of bank robberies. Or it could have been
that the case was a political hot button and the locals just wanted
someone else to catch the flak. All of these considerations went
into my decision on how to respond to a request for assistance,
because I knew all of them would help determine whether that
particular case was going to get solved.
Initially, I had provided written analyses. As the caseload
increased exponentially, though, I didn’t have time for that any
longer. I would take notes as I examined a file. en, when I
spoke to the local investigator—either in person or on the phone
—I would go over my notes and recall the case. Normally, the
cops would take copious notes of their own on what I was telling
them. On those rare occasions when a cop was in the same room
with me, if he would just listen without writing anything down, I
would quickly lose patience, tell him it was his case, not mine,
and if he wanted our help, he’d better get his ass in gear and work
as hard as I was.
I’d done enough of these that, like a doctor, I knew how long
each “office visit” should take. By the time I’d reviewed the case, I
knew whether or not I could help, so I wanted to focus on the
crime-scene analysis and victimology right away. Why was this
victim selected over all other potential victims? How was he or
she murdered? From those two questions, you can begin to
address the ultimate question: who?
Like Sherlock Holmes, I had quickly come to realize that the
more ordinary and routine the crime, the less behavioral evidence
there was to work with. I couldn’t be much help on street
holdups. ey’re too common, the behavior is too mundane, and
therefore the suspect pool is enormous. Likewise, a single
gunshot or stab wound presents a more difficult scenario than
multiple wounds, an outdoor case is more challenging than an
indoor one, a single high-risk victim such as a prostitute doesn’t
give us as much information as a series.
e first thing I’d look at was the medical examiner’s report to
learn the nature and type of wounds, the cause of death, whether
there was any sexual assault, and if so, what kind. e quality of
medical examiner work varied wildly throughout the thousands
of police jurisdictions around the country. Some of them were
real forensic pathologists and their work was first-rate. For
example, when Dr. James Luke was medical examiner of
Washington, D.C., we could always count on complete, detailed,
and accurate protocols. Since his retirement from that job, Dr.
Luke has been a valued consultant to my unit at Quantico. On
the other hand, I saw situations in small towns down South
where the coroner was the local funeral director. His idea of a
postmortem exam would be to show up at the scene, kick the
body, and say, “Yep, that boy’s sure dead.”
After I’d gone through the body-related findings, I’d read the
preliminary police report. When the first officer arrived, what did
he see? From that point on, it’s possible the scene was altered,
either by him or someone on the investigative team. It was
important to me to be able to visualize the scene as closely as
possible to how the offender left it. If it wasn’t the way it had
been, I wanted to know that. For example, if there was a pillow
on the victim’s face, who put it there? Was it there when the
officer arrived? Did a family member who found the body do it
for the sake of dignity? Or was there some other explanation?
Finally, I’d look at the crime-scene photos and try to complete
the picture in my mind.
Photographs weren’t always of the best quality, particularly
back when most departments were still shooting in black and
white. So I’d also ask for a schematic drawing of the crime scene
with all directions and footprints noted. If detectives had
something particular they wanted me to look at, I asked them to
write it on the back of the photo, so I wouldn’t be influenced by
someone else’s observation in my first pass-through. By the same
token, if they had a particular suspect at the top of their list, I
didn’t want to know, or I asked them to send it to me in a sealed
envelope so I could be objective in my own analysis.
It was also important to try to figure out if anything had been
taken from the victim or removed from the crime scene.
Generally, it was clear if cash or valuables or prominent jewelry
was taken, each of which would help point to the offender’s
motive. Other items are not always so easy to track.
When an officer or detective would tell me that nothing was
taken, I’d ask, “How do you know? Do you mean to tell me that
if I took a bra or a single pair of panties from your wife’s or
girlfriend’s drawer, you’d be able to tell? Because if so, you’re a
sick puppy.” Something as subtle as a barrette or lock of hair
could be missing, and that would be difficult to trace. e mere
fact that nothing appeared to be missing was never a definitive
finding in my mind. And when we’d eventually catch an offender
and search his premises, we’d often find surprise souvenirs.
It was clear from early on that a lot of folks, both inside the
Bureau and out, really didn’t understand what we were all about.
is was brought home to me during a two-week homicide
school Bob Ressler and I were teaching in New York in 1981.
ere were about a hundred detectives, mainly from NYPD but
also from jurisdictions all over the New York metropolitan area.
One morning, before the class on profiling began, I’m at the
front of the room setting up the large, three-quarter-inch Sony
VCR we used in those days. is obviously overworked, clearly
burnt-out detective with pale, bloodshot eyes wanders by me and
says, “You’re into this profiling stuff, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I answer, turning to the boxy VCR. “In
fact, this is the profiling machine right here.”
He looks at me skeptically, the way seasoned detectives do
when dealing with a suspect, but he stays with me.
“Give me your hand,” I say. “I’ll show you how it works.”
Tentatively, he gives me his hand. On a three-quarter-inch
VCR, the tape cassette slot is pretty large. I take his hand, put it
in the tape slot, and turn some dials. Meanwhile, Ressler’s
somewhere else in the room, preparing his material. He overhears
me and is ready to come over, thinking I’m about to get punched
out.
But the guy just says, “So what’s my profile?”
I say, “Why don’t you wait for the class. You’ll see how it
works.”
Fortunately for me, the guy must have figured out during
class what was going on as I explained the profiling process and
used the VCR for its real purpose: to demonstrate! And he wasn’t
waiting for me at the end. But the point of this story is that I’ve
always wished it were that easy to come up with a usable profile.
Not only can you not stick a hand (or any other body part) in a
machine and come up with a profile, for years computer experts
have been working with law enforcement officials to develop
programs that would replicate the logical processes we go
through. So far, they haven’t come up with much.
e fact of the matter is, profiling and crime-scene analysis is
a lot more than simply inputting data and crunching it through.
To be a good profiler, you have to be able to evaluate a wide
range of evidence and data. But you also have to be able to walk
in the shoes of both the offender and the victim.
You have to be able to re-create the crime scene in your head.
You need to know as much as you can about the victim so that
you can imagine how she might have reacted. You have to be able
to put yourself in her place as the attacker threatens her with a
gun or a knife, a rock, his fists, or whatever. You have to be able
to feel her fear as he approaches her. You have to be able to feel
her pain as he rapes her or beats her or cuts her. You have to try
to imagine what she was going through when he tortured her for
his sexual gratification. You have to understand what it’s like to
scream in terror and agony, realizing that it won’t help, that it
won’t get him to stop. You have to know what it was like. And
that is a heavy burden to have to carry, especially when the victim
is a child or elderly.
When the director and cast of e Silence of the Lambs came
to Quantico to prepare for filming, I brought Scott Glenn, who
played Jack Crawford—the special agent some say was based on
me—into my office. Glenn was a pretty liberal guy who had
strong feelings on rehabilitation, redemption, and the
fundamental goodness of people. I showed him some of the
gruesome crime-scene photos we worked with every day. I let
him experience recordings made by killers while they were
torturing their victims. I made him listen to one of two teenage
girls in Los Angeles being tortured to death in the back of a van
by two thrill-seeking killers who had recently been let out of
prison.
Glenn wept as his listened to the tapes. He said to me, “I had
no idea there were people out there who could do anything like
this.” An intelligent, compassionate father with two girls of his
own, Glenn said that after seeing and hearing what he did in my
office, he could no longer oppose the death penalty: “e
experience in Quantico changed my mind about that for all
time.”
But just as difficult, I have to put myself in the position of the
attacker, to think as he thinks, to plan along with him, to
understand and feel his gratification in this one moment out of
his life in which his pent-up fantasies come true and he is finally
in control, completely able to manipulate and dominate another
human being. I have to walk in that killer’s shoes, too.
e two men torturing and killing the teenage girls in the van
were named Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris. ey even had a
nickname for their van: Murder Mac. ey met while serving
time at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. Bittaker
was serving time for assault with a deadly weapon. Norris was a
convicted rapist. When they discovered their mutual interest in
dominating and hurting young women, they realized they were
soul mates. And when they were both paroled in 1979, they got
together in a Los Angeles motel and laid plans to kidnap, rape,
torture, and kill one girl of appropriate age for each teen year,
thirteen through nineteen. ey had already successfully carried
out their plans against five girls when one managed to escape
from them after her rape and go to the police.
Norris, the less dominant of the two, eventually caved in to
police examination, confessed, and in exchange for immunity
from the death sentence, agreed to finger the even more sadistic
and aggressive Bittaker. He led police to the various body sites.
One, already skeletonized from the California sun, had an ice
pick still protruding from the ear.
What is notable about this case, aside from the heartrending
tragedy of these promising lives snuffed out and the utter
depravity of torturing young girls, in Norris’s words, “for fun,” is
the different behavioral dynamic when two offenders are involved
in the same crime. Generally, what we see is one more dominant
and one more compliant partner, and often one more organized
and one less organized. Serial killers are inadequate types to begin
with, and the ones who need partners to carry out their work are
the most inadequate of all.
As horrible as their crimes were (and Lawrence Bittaker is
among the most loathsome and repugnant individuals I have ever
come across), they are not, unfortunately, unique.
Like Bittaker and Norris, James Russell Odom and James
Clayton Lawson Jr. met in prison. It was the mid-1970s and they
were both doing time for rape at Atascadero State Mental
Hospital in California. Looking back at their records, I would
consider Russell Odom a psychopath and Clay Lawson more of a
schizophrenic. While at Atascadero, Clay evocatively described to
Russell his plans for what he would like to do when he was let
out. is included capturing women, cutting off their breasts,
removing their ovaries, and sticking knives into their vaginas. He
said he was inspired by Charles Manson and his followers.
Lawson made it clear that sexual intercourse was not part of his
plan. He did not consider this part of “doing his thing.”
Odom, on the other hand, considered intercourse very much
his thing and, as soon as he was released, drove his 1974 powderblue Volkswagen Beetle cross-country to Columbia, South
Carolina, where Lawson was working as a pipe fitter and living
with his parents after parole. (VW Beetles, as I’ve noted, seemed
to be the car of choice for serial killers—as well as FBI agents
without savings—at that time.) Odom thought that with their
related but separate interests, they could make a good team and
each do his own thing.
Within a few days of Odom’s arrival, the two of them go out
looking for a victim in the 1974 Ford Comet belonging to
Lawson’s father. ey stop at a 7-Eleven on U.S. Highway 1 and
spot a young woman they like working behind the counter. But
too many people are around, so they leave and go to a porno
movie.
I think it’s important to underscore here that when they
realized they couldn’t stage a successful abduction without being
resisted or at least witnessed, they left without having committed
their intended crime. Both men were mentally ill, and in
Lawson’s case, a pretty good argument could be made for
criminal insanity. Yet when circumstances did not favor the success
of their crime, they refrained from committing it. ey were not
under such a compulsion that they were compelled to act. So I
will say it again for the record: in my opinion and based on my
experience, the mere presence of a mental disorder does not let
an offender off the hook. Unless he is completely delusional and
does not comprehend his actions in the real world, he chooses
whether or not to hurt someone else. And the truly bonkers ones
are easy to catch. Serial killers are not.
e next night after their first hunt, Odom and Lawson go to
a drive-in movie theater. When the show is over, sometime after
midnight, they drive back to the 7-Eleven. ey go in and buy a
few small items—a chocolate milk, a bag of peanuts, a pickle.
is time, they’re the only ones in the store, so they abduct the
young female store clerk with Odom’s .22-caliber handgun.
Lawson has a .32 pistol in his pocket. When the police arrive
later on, after being called by a customer who notices the store is
unattended, they find that the cash register has not been
touched, the woman’s pocketbook is behind the counter, and
nothing of value has been taken.
e two men drive to a secluded spot. Odom orders her to
undress completely, then rapes her in the backseat of the car.
Meanwhile, Lawson is standing outside by the driver’s door,
telling Odom to hurry up and give him his turn. After about five
minutes, Odom ejaculates, buckles his pants, and gets out of the
car so Lawson can take his place.
Odom walks away from the car, he says, to throw up. Lawson
later claims that Odom told him, “We had to get rid of her,”
even though Lawson had elicited a promise from her that she
wouldn’t tell if they let her go. At any rate, about five minutes
later, Odom hears the woman scream from the car and yell, “Oh,
my throat!” When he returns, Lawson has cut her throat and is
mutilating her naked body with a knife he’d bought from the 7Eleven the previous night.
e next day, as the two of them are in Odom’s VW, getting
rid of the victim’s clothing that they had wrapped into two
bundles, Lawson tells him he had tried to cannibalize the
woman’s sexual organs after the attack, but it had made him sick.
e horribly mutilated body was discovered in plain view, and
the killers were arrested within a few days of the murder. Russell
Odom, scared for his life, readily admitted the rape but denied
he had taken part in the murder.
In his statement to police, Clay Lawson made it clear he had
had no intercourse with the victim: “I did not rape the girl. I
only wanted to destroy her.” is is a guy who chewed chalk in
the courtroom during his trial.
ey were tried separately. Odom received life plus forty years
for rape, unlawful weapon possession, and accessory before and
after the fact to murder. Lawson was convicted of first-degree
murder and was electrocuted on May 18, 1976.
Like Bittaker and Norris, this case is characterized by a mixed
presentation of behavior—and therefore behavioral evidence—
because of the participation of two distinct personalities. e
bodily mutilation is a sign of a disorganized personality type,
while the finding of semen in the victim’s vagina strongly points
to an organized personality. We taught the Odom and Lawson
case at Quantico, and it was in the back of my mind when I got a
call from Chief John Reeder of the Logan Township,
Pennsylvania, Police Department. It was early in my career as a
profiler. Reeder was a National Academy graduate, and through
Special Agent Dale Frye of the FBI’s resident agency in
Johnstown, he and Blair County district attorney Oliver E.
Mattas Jr. asked for help in solving the rape, murder, and
mutilation of a young woman named Betty Jane Shade.
e facts presented to me were these:
About a year earlier, on May 29, 1979, this twenty-two-yearold woman was walking home from her baby-sitting job at about
10:15 P.M. Four days later, a man who stated he was out on a
nature walk stumbled upon her badly mutilated but wellpreserved body in an illegal garbage dump site on top of
Wopsonock Mountain, near Altoona. Her long blond hair had
been cut off and was hanging on a nearby tree. County coroner
Charles R. Burkey told the local newspaper it was the “most
gruesome” death he had ever seen. He found that Betty Jane
Shade had been sexually assaulted, her jaw fractured, her eyes
blackened, the body with numerous stab wounds. e cause of
death was a severe blow to the head, and postmortem mutilation
included numerous stab wounds, the removal of both breasts,
and an incision from the victim’s vagina to rectum.
Although the partially undigested contents of her stomach
indicated she had been killed soon after she disappeared, her
body was too well preserved to have been at the dump site for
four days. ere was no larvae infestation or trauma from
animals that one would normally expect. e police had also
been investigating complaints of illegal dumping at the
mountainous site, so they would have found the body themselves
had it been there earlier.
I reviewed all of the case materials Reeder sent me and came
up with a profile, which I related during a lengthy telephone
conference. During this conference, I tried to educate the police
about the principles of profiling and the kinds of things we look
for. I thought they should be looking for a white male, aged
seventeen to twenty-five, though I noted that if he lived way the
hell out in the sticks, he could be older because his social
development would be slower. He would be thin or wiry, a loner,
not exactly a whiz kid in high school, introverted, probably into
pornography. e childhood background would be classic—a
dysfunctional, broken family with an absent father and a
domineering, overly protective mother. She might have given
him the impression that all women are bad except for her. e
UNSUB would therefore fear women and not be able to deal
with them, which was why he had to render her unconscious or
powerless so quickly.
He knew her very well. at was clear from the severe facial
trauma. He had a tremendous amount of anger and sought to
depersonalize her, through the face, breast, and genital
mutilation. e removal of the hair said something else to me.
While this could also be thought of as an attempt at
depersonalization, I knew from victimology that Shade was a
neat, meticulous individual and was proud of her well-groomed,
well-cared-for hair. So the cutting off of the hair was an insult, a
degrading gesture. And this also hinted at someone who knew
her very well. Yet there was no sign of sadistic abuse or torture
before death as there had been with Bittaker and Norris. is was
not someone who derived his sexual satisfaction from inflicting
pain.
I told the police not to look for the “used-car salesman type
down the street with the outgoing personality.” If this guy was
employed at all, it would be menial; a janitorial or blue-collar
job. Anyone who would leave the body at that sort of dump site
had to have a menial job or something that involved dirt or
grime. e time of the abduction, the missing breasts, the
obvious moving of the body, and the revisiting the final dump
site, all told me he’d be mainly nocturnal. I expected him to visit
the cemetery, maybe go to the funeral, to twist things around in
his mind until he was convinced he had had a “normal”
relationship with Betty Jane. For that reason, I thought a
polygraph would be virtually useless even after they had a
suspect. e chances were strong he would live somewhere
between her home and where she was seen leaving work at her
baby-sitting job.
ough they didn’t have anything solid enough for an arrest,
the police told me they had two suspects they considered strong.
One was her live-in boyfriend and self-described fiancé, Charles
F. Soult Jr., known as Butch. He would certainly have to be
strongly considered. But the police were very high on the other
one: the man who found the body and whose story didn’t quite
add up. He was a machinist for the railroad, out on disability. He
said he’d been out on a nature walk but had found the body at an
obvious trash dump. An elderly man out walking his dog said he
had seen this individual urinating at the scene. He was dressed
inappropriately for a long hike, and though it had been raining,
he was completely dry. He lived within four blocks of Betty Jane
Shade’s house, and had tried unsuccessfully to pick her up on
several occasions. He was nervous in his encounters with the
police and said he had been afraid to report the body because he
didn’t want to be blamed for the crime. is is a typical excuse by
a subject who comes forward proactively to inject himself into
the investigation and tries to deflect suspicion from himself. He
was a beer drinker and heavy smoker, certainly strong enough to
kill and dispose of the body himself. He had a history of
antisocial behavior. On the night of the murder, he and his wife
claimed to be home watching television by themselves, which
provided them with no solid alibi. I told the police that someone
like this would contact an attorney and be uncooperative from
then on. at was exactly what had happened with him, they
reported. He’d gotten a lawyer and refused a polygraph.
All of this sounded pretty promising. But what bothered me
most was that he was married with two children and living with
his wife. is wouldn’t have been his style. If a married guy had
done the murder, he would have a lot of sadistic rage toward
women. He would draw out the killing, abuse her more before
death, but not mutilate her afterward. He was also thirty, which
struck me as being on the high side.
Soult looked like a stronger choice to me. He fit virtually all
of the profile elements. His parents had separated when he was
young. His mother was a domineering woman, overly involved
in her son’s life. At twenty-six, he was inept with women. He told
police he had had just two sexual encounters in his life, both
with an older woman who made fun of him because he couldn’t
get it up. He said he and Betty Jane were very much in love and
engaged to be married, though she dated and had sexual
relationships with other men. I felt sure that if she were still alive,
she’d tell a completely different story. At her funeral, he said he
wanted to dig up the coffin and climb in there with her. And
when interviewed by the police, he had cried incessantly over the
loss of Betty Jane.
Butch Soult and his brother, Mike, worked as trash haulers,
the police said.
“Jesus, this sounds pretty good,” I replied.
ey had access to the dump site, reason to know about it and
go there, and a means of transporting the body.
But as much as I liked Butch as a suspect, two things bothered
me. First, as I’d expected, he was kind of a little twerp who wasn’t
much bigger than Shade. I didn’t think he was capable of moving
the body or arranging it into the froglike position with the legs
spread and bent at the knees in which it was found. Second,
semen was found in the victim’s vagina, indicative of a traditional
rape. I would not have been surprised to find semen on the body,
in her underpants or other clothing, but not this. Like David
Berkowitz, this guy would be a masturbator, but not a rapist. He
had to get his sexual satisfaction indirectly. It didn’t add up.
is was a mixed organized-disorganized presentation, in
many ways similar to the murder of Francine Elveson in New
York, with the same early blitz attack, facial disfigurement, and
genital mutilation. Whereas Elveson’s nipples had been cut off,
Shade’s entire breasts had been removed.
But in the New York case, the larger Carmine Calabro had
carried the tiny victim a couple of floors up and left her. And the
ejaculation had all been masturbatory.
Keeping the lessons from Odom and Lawson in mind, I
thought there was only one logical possibility. I believed it was
likely Butch Soult had met Betty Jane on the street after she left
her job, they got into an argument, he beat her up and probably
rendered her unconscious, then transported her to a secluded
location. I also believed he could have struck the blow that killed
her, cut off her hair, mutilated her body, and kept the breasts as
souvenirs. But between the time she was first attacked and the
time she was killed, she had been raped, and I didn’t think a
disorganized, sexually inadequate, mother-dominated young man
such as Soult was capable of that. And I didn’t think he had
moved the body by himself.
Butch’s brother, Mike, was the logical second suspect. He
came from the same background and had the same job. He had
spent some time in a mental institution, and had a record of
violence, behavior problems, and poor anger control. e main
difference was he was married, though their mother was so
domineering in his life as well. e night Betty Jane Shade was
abducted, Mike’s wife had been in the hospital having a baby.
Her pregnancy was a major stressor, plus it had deprived him of a
sexual release. It made perfect sense that after the attack, the
panicked Butch had called his brother, who had raped the young
woman while Butch looked on, then, after the murder, had
helped him dispose of the body.
I told the police an indirect, nonthreatening approach would
be best. Unfortunately, they had already interviewed Butch
several times and polygraphed him. As I knew it would, the exam
showed no deceit on his part, but inappropriate emotional
reactions. I thought the best approach now would be to focus on
Mike, hammering home that all he did was have sex with Shade
and help dispose of her body, but that if he didn’t cooperate at
this point, he would be in as much hot water as his brother.
is tactic paid off. Both brothers—and their sister, Cathy
Wiesinger, who claimed to be Betty Jane’s best friend—were
arrested. Cathy, according to Mike, had been in on the body
disposal as well.
So what happened? I believe Butch had been trying to have
sex with this sexually attractive, sexually experienced woman, but
couldn’t. His resentment built up until it didn’t take much to set
him off. After he attacked Shade, he panicked and called in his
brother. But his anger built even further when Mike could have
sex with her and he couldn’t. His anger continued, and four days
later he mutilated the body, giving him “the final word.”
One of the victim’s breasts was recovered. Mike told police
that Butch kept the other one, which didn’t surprise me.
Wherever he hid it, it was never found.
Charles “Butch” Soult was convicted of first-degree murder
and Mike, following a plea arrangement, was sent to a mental
institution. Chief Reeder commented publicly that we were
directly instrumental in developing the investigation and
obtaining statements from the perpetrators. We, in turn, were
fortunate to have a local partner like him who had been trained
in our methods and understood the collaborative process
between police and Quantico.
Because of this cooperation, we were able to take out a killer
and his accomplice before they had a chance to kill again. Chief
Reeder and his men and women went back to the business of
keeping the peace in Logan Township, Pennsylvania. And I went
back to my 150-odd other active cases, hoping I’d learned
something that would help me in at least one of them to walk in
the shoes of both perpetrator and victim.
10
Everybody Has a Rock
One evening years before, when I was back home after my illfated college experience in Montana, I was having dinner with
my parents at a pizza and beer place in Uniondale, Long Island,
called Coldstream. Just as I took a bite out of my slice of every
thing-with-extra-cheese, my mother—out of the blue—said,
“John, have you ever had sexual relations with a woman?”
I swallow hard, trying to gulp down what I had just bitten off.
is isn’t the kind of question nineteen- or twenty-year-old kids
are used to being asked by their mothers in the mid-1960s. I turn
to my father for some sign of support, but he’s stone-faced. He’d
been caught as much off-guard as I had.
“Well, have you?” she persists. She wasn’t a Holmes for
nothing.
“Uh . . . yeah, Mom. I have.”
I see this look of revulsion come over my mother’s face. “Well,
who was she?” she demands.
“Ah . . . Well . . .” I’ve sort of lost the healthy appetite I’d
come into the place with. “Actually, there’ve been several.”
I don’t tell her one had been in her mid-teens in a home for
unwed mothers in Bozeman. But you’d have thought I just told
her where I’d hidden the bodies after I’d dismembered them, and
it had been right in their basement. “Who is going to have you as
a husband now?” she laments.
Again I turn to my unusually silent father. Come on, Dad, help
me out!
“Oh, I don’t know, Dolores. It’s not a big deal these days.”
“It’s always been a ‘big deal,’ Jack,” she counters, then turns
back to me. “What would happen, John, if your future bride
someday asked you whether you had had relations with another
woman before you met her?”
I pause in mid-bite. “Well, Mom, I would tell her the truth.”
“No, don’t say that,” my father pipes up.
“What do you mean, Jack?” my mother asks. Okay, Dad, let’s
see you get out of this one.
e interrogation session ended in an uneasy stalemate. I’m
not sure if I got anything out of the encounter. I either told Pam
of my past or she suspected it. At any rate, she did agree to marry
me, despite my mother’s fears. But when I thought back to that
grilling from my perspective as a federal law enforcement official,
profiler, and expert on criminal behavior and psychology, an
important realization did dawn on me. Even if I’d had all the
training and analytical experience that I have now, I still wouldn’t
have handled my mother’s inquisition any better!
Because she’d gotten to me on a vulnerable point of truth.
I’ll give you another example. Ever since I became the FBI’s
chief profiler, I personally selected and trained all of the other
profilers. For that reason, I’ve enjoyed a particularly close and
cooperative relationship with all the men and women who’ve
been on my team. Most of them have become stars in their own
right. But if I could ever be said to have had a true disciple
among them, it would be Greg Cooper. Greg left a prestigious
job as chief of police in a town in Utah while still in his early
thirties and joined the FBI after hearing Ken Lanning and Bill
Hagmaier speak at a law enforcement seminar. He distinguished
himself in the Seattle Field Office, but always had the dream of
coming to Quantico to work in Behavioral Science. He had
requested and studied all of my profiling and analysis of the
Green River Killer, and when I flew out to Seattle to appear on a
viewer-participation television special called Manhunt Live, Greg
volunteered to be my chauffeur and guide. When I became chief
of the reorganized Investigative Support Unit, Greg was working
in an FBI resident agency in Orange County, California, and
living in Laguna Niguel. I brought him back to Quantico, where
he became an outstanding performer.
When he first came into the unit, Greg was assigned to share
an underground, windowless office with Jana Monroe, a former
police officer and homicide detective in California before she
became a special agent who, among her many other fine
qualities, happens to be a smashingly attractive blond. In other
words, she puts it all together. Now, not too many men would
find this a hardship assignment, but Greg happens to be a devout
Mormon, a very straight and devoted family man with five lovely
children and a stunning wife named Rhonda, to whom it was a
major sacrifice to move from their sunny California paradise to
sleepy, hot, and humid Virginia. Every time she asked about his
office mate, Greg would hem and haw and try to change the
subject.
Finally, about six months after he’d been on the job for us,
Greg brings Rhonda to the unit Christmas party. I’m not there
because I’m working a case out of town, but the naturally
vivacious Jana is. And typical for her in a party situation, she’s
wearing a subtle, understated, short, and form-fitting bright red
dress with a plunging neckline.
When I get back, Jim Wright, the unit’s second-in-command
who has taken over for me as profiling program manager, tells me
there were real fireworks between Rhonda and Greg after the
party. She’s none too happy about his spending his days in such
close confines with a beautiful, tough, charming agent who
knows her way around a firing range and dance floor with equal
facility,
So I have my secretary get Greg out of a meeting and tell him
I want to see him right away. He gets to my office looking
somewhat concerned. He’s only been here six months, this unit
has been his dream, and he really wants to make good.
I look up from my desk and say, “Close the door, Greg. Sit
down.” He does, even more disturbed by my tone of voice. “I
just got off the phone with Rhonda,” I continue. “I understand
you’ve had some problems.”
“You just got off the phone with Rhonda?” He’s not even
looking at me. He’s staring straight at the call-director phone on
my desk.
“Look, Greg,” I said in my most soothing counselor tones,
“I’d like to cover for you, but when you and Jana go on the road
together, I can’t make any special provisions. is is something
you’re going to have to deal with on your own. Rhonda obviously
knows what’s going on between you and Jana and—”
“Nothing’s going on between me and Jana!” he splutters.
“I know there are a lot of stresses in this job. But you’ve got a
beautiful, terrific wife, nice kids. Don’t throw it all away.”
“It’s not what you think, John. It’s not what she thinks. You
have to believe me.” And all the time he’s still staring at that
telephone, maybe thinking if he concentrates hard enough, he’s
going to be able to burn it right through the desk. He’s broken
out in a cold sweat. I can see the carotid artery pounding in his
neck. He’s heading south fast.
So at that point I let up. “Look at you, you miserable wretch!”
I grin triumphantly. “You call yourself an interrogator?” At the
time he was preparing a chapter on interrogation for the Crime
Classification Manual. “Have you done anything to be guilty
about?”
“No, John. I swear!”
“And look! You’re putty in my hands! You’re completely
innocent. You’re a former chief of police. You’re an experienced
interrogator. And yet I was able to play you like a yo-yo. So what
do you have to say for yourself?”
At that particular time, as the sweat of relief rolled off his
balding head, he didn’t have anything to say for himself, but he
got the point. I knew I could jerk him around like that because it
had been done to me with equal success and could be again if the
situation arose.
We’re all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how much you know,
how experienced you are, how many suspect interrogations
you’ve handled successfully. It doesn’t matter if you understand
the technique. Each of us can be gotten to—if you can just figure
out where and how we’re vulnerable.
I’d learned this during one of my earliest cases as a profiler,
and I put it to use many times thereafter—not only in
demonstrations to my own team. It was the first time I actually
“staged” an interrogation.
In December 1979, Special Agent Robert Leary from the
Rome, Georgia, Resident Agency called with the details of a
particularly horrible case and asked me to give it my top priority.
e week before, Mary Frances Stoner, a pretty and outgoing
twelve-year-old girl in Adairsville, about a half-hour from Rome,
had disappeared after being dropped off by the school bus at the
driveway to her house, approximately a hundred yards back from
the road. Her body was later found about ten miles away in a
wooded lovers’ lane area by a young couple who noticed the
bright yellow coat over her head. ey contacted police and did
not disturb the scene, a critical consideration. e cause of death
was determined to be blunt-force trauma to the head.
Postmortem examination detected skull fracturing consistent
with a large rock. (ere’s a bloodstained one right near her head
in the crime-scene photos.) Marks on the neck also indicated
manual strangulation from the rear.
Before I looked at the case materials, I wanted to know as
much as possible about the victim. No one had anything other
than wonderful things to say about Mary Frances. She was
described as friendly to everyone, gregarious, and charming. She
was sweet and innocent, a drum majorette in the school band
who often wore her uniform to school. She was a cute twelveyear-old who looked twelve, rather than trying to look eighteen.
She wasn’t promiscuous, she’d never been involved with drugs or
alcohol. e autopsy clearly indicated she’d been a virgin when
raped. All in all, she was what we would characterize as a low-risk
victim taken from a low-risk setting.
After being briefed, listening to Leary, and studying the files
and crime-scene photos, I jotted down the following half-page
note:
Profile
Sex—m
Race—w
Age—mid-twenties-late twenties
Marital—married: problems or divorced
Military—dishonorable, medical
Occupation—blue collar: electrician, plumber
IQ—average-above average
Education—H.S. at most; dropout
Criminal Record—arson, rape
Personality—confident, cocky, passed polygraph
Color Vehicle—black or blue
Interrogate—direct, projection
is was a rape of opportunity, and the murder had not been
planned or intended. e disheveled appearance of the clothing
on the body indicated that Mary Frances had been forced to
undress, then was allowed to redress hurriedly after the rape. I
could see from the photos that one shoe was untied, and the
report noted bleeding in her panties. No debris was on her back,
behind, or feet, which suggested she was raped in a car, not on
the wooded ground where her body was found.
Looking intently at the rather routine crime-scene photos, I
began to understand what had happened. I could imagine the
whole thing.
Because of her youth, as well as her outgoing and trusting
nature, Mary Frances would have been easily approachable in so
nonthreatening an environment as the school bus stop. e
UNSUB probably coaxed her up to his car, then grabbed her or
forced her in with a knife or gun. e remoteness of the area in
which her body was found indicated that he knew the region
well and knew he wouldn’t be disturbed there.
From the abduction scene I could tell this wasn’t a planned
crime, but rather one that took form as he drove past. Just as in
the Odom and Lawson case, had anyone else happened upon the
scene at the right time, the crime wouldn’t have gone forward.
Because of the young girl’s cuteness and sunny disposition, in his
own mind the fantasy-fueled offender had made over her
innocent friendliness into promiscuity and the desire to play
sexually with him.
Of course, in actuality, nothing could have been further from
the truth. Once he assaulted her, she would have been terrified,
in severe pain, crying out for help, and begging for her life. e
fantasy he’d been nurturing for years was one thing, but the
reality wasn’t pretty. He’d lost control of the situation with this
little girl and realized he was in one hell of a mess.
At this point, he realizes the only way out for him is to kill
her. But since she’s in fear for her life, controlling her is much
more difficult than he’d imagined. So to make it easier on
himself, to make her more cooperative and compliant, he tells
her to get dressed quickly and he’ll let her go—either he’ll let her
run away or maybe he’ll tie her to a tree and leave the scene
himself.
But as soon as she turns her back on him, he comes up behind
her and strangles her. He’s probably able to render her
unconscious, but strangulation requires a lot of upper-body
strength. He wasn’t able to control her before, and he can’t finish
the job. He drags her under a tree, picks up the nearest large rock
he can find, and drops it down on her head three or four times,
killing her.
I didn’t feel the offender knew Mary Frances well, but they
had seen each other around town enough for her to have
recognized him and for him to have formed fantasies about her.
He’d probably seen her going to school in her little majorette
uniform.
I knew from the placement of the coat over her head that our
UNSUB didn’t feel good about the crime. I also knew that time
was against the police. In this type of crime and with this type of
intelligent, organized offender, the longer he had to think about
it, rationalize it, and justify it as the victim’s fault, the more
difficult it would be to get a confession. Even if he were
polygraphed, the results would be inconclusive at best. And as
soon as he felt the heat was off and he wouldn’t arouse suspicion
by leaving, he’d be off to another part of the country where he’d
be difficult to trace and where some other little girl would be in
danger.
To me, the UNSUB was clearly from the area and the police
had almost assuredly interviewed him already. He’d be
cooperative but cocky, and if the police accused him, he wouldn’t
break. I told them a crime with this degree of sophistication
would not be a first, although there was a good chance this was
his first murder. His blue or black car would be several years old
because he could not afford a newer one, but it would be
functional and well maintained. Everything in it would be in
place. From my experience, orderly, compulsive people like that
generally favored darker cars.
After hearing all this, one of the officers on the phone said,
“You just described a guy we released as a suspect in the case.” He
was still a suspect in another crime and he fit the profile to a T.
His name was Darrell Gene Devier, a white male, twenty-four
years of age, who’d been married and divorced twice and who was
currently living with his first ex-wife. He was a tree-limb trimmer
in Rome, Georgia, where he was a strong suspect in the rape of a
thirteen-year-old girl, but had never been charged. He had joined
the Army after his first divorce but had gone AWOL and was
discharged after seven months. He drove a three-year-old black
Ford Pinto that was well maintained. He admitted to having
been arrested as a juvenile for possession of a Molotov cocktail.
He dropped out of school after eighth grade, but IQ tests listed a
range of 100 to 110.
He had been interviewed to see if he had seen or heard
anything, since he’d been trimming trees on the Stoners’ street
for the power company for about two weeks before Mary
Frances’s abduction. e police told me he was scheduled for a
polygraph that very day.
at wouldn’t be a good idea, I told them. ey wouldn’t get
anything out of the exam, and it would only reinforce the
suspect’s ability to cope with the interrogation process. At that
time, we didn’t have a lot of field experience with interrogation,
but from the prison interviews and the ongoing serial-killer
study, I felt that I knew what I was talking about. Sure enough,
when they called me back the next day, they told me the lie
detector had been inconclusive.
Now that he knows he can beat the box, there’s only one way
to get him, I said. Stage the interrogation at the police station at
night. e suspect will feel more comfortable initially, making
him more vulnerable to questioning. is will also give him a
message about your seriousness and dedication. He knows there
isn’t an arbitrary break point like lunch or dinner, and he knows
he’s not going to be hung out as a media trophy if he caves in.
Have the local police and the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office carry out
the interrogation together to show a united front and to imply
that the full weight of the government of the United States is
against him. Pile up stacks of file folders on tables in front of him
with his name on them, even if they’re just full of blank pages.
Most important: without saying anything about it, place the
bloody rock on a low table at a forty-five-degree angle to his line
of sight so that he’ll have to turn his head to look at it. Closely
observe all his nonverbal cues—his behavior, respiration,
perspiration, carotid pulse. If he is the killer, he will not be able
to ignore that rock, even though you haven’t mentioned it or
explained its significance.
What we needed to create was what I call the “high ass-pucker
factor.” I actually used the Stoner case as a laboratory for my
theories. Many of the techniques we refined later had their
experimental origins here.
He won’t confess, I continued. Georgia is a capitalpunishment state, and even if he’s only sent to prison, his rap as a
child molester could get his ass raped the first time he takes a
shower. All of the other prisoners will be gunning for this guy.
Use low, mysterious lighting and have no more than two
officers or agents in the interview environment at one time,
preferably one from the FBI and one from the Adairsville PD.
What you’ve got to do is imply that you understand the subject,
understand what was going through his mind and the stresses he
was under. No matter how disgusting it feels to you, you’re going
to have to project the blame onto the victim. Imply that she
seduced him. Ask if she led him on, if she turned on him, if she
threatened him with blackmail. Give him a face-saving scenario.
Give him a way of explaining his actions.
e other thing I knew from all the cases I’d seen is that in
blunt-force-trauma or knife homicides, it’s difficult for the
attacker to avoid getting at least traces of the victim’s blood on
him. It’s common enough that you can use it. When he starts to
waffle, even slightly, I said, look him straight in the eye and tell
him the most disturbing part of the whole case is the known fact
that he got Mary’s blood on him.
“We know you got blood on you, Gene; on your hands, on your
clothing. e question for us isn’t ‘Did you do it?’ We know you did.
e question is ‘Why?’ We think we know why and we understand.
All you have to do is tell us if we’re right.”
And that was exactly how it went down. ey bring Devier in.
He looks instantly at the rock, starts perspiring and breathing
heavily. His body language is completely different from the
previous interviews: tentative, defensive. e interrogators
project blame and responsibility onto the girl, and when he looks
as if he’s going with it, they bring up the blood. is really upsets
him. You can often tell you’ve got the right guy if he shuts up
and starts listening intently as you speak. An innocent guy will
yell and scream. And even if a guilty guy yells and screams to
make you think he’s innocent, you can tell the difference.
He admits to the rape and agrees with the interrogator that
she threatened him. Bob Leary tells him they know he didn’t
plan on killing her. If he had, he would have used something
more efficient than the rock. In the end, he confesses to the
murder and to the rape in Rome the previous year. Darrell Gene
Devier was tried for the rape and murder of Mary Frances Stoner,
convicted, and sentenced to death. He was executed in the
Georgia electric chair on May 18, 1995, almost sixteen years
after the murder and his arrest; that’s almost four more years than
Mary Frances had on earth.
e key to this type of interrogation, I found, is to be creative;
to use your imagination. I had to ask myself, “What would get to
me if I were the one who did it?” We’re all vulnerable. It’s going
to be a different thing for each of us. In my case, with my sloppy
bookkeeping, my SAC could probably call me in, have me see
one of my expense vouchers on his desk, and make me sweat.
But there’s always something.
Everybody has a rock.
e lessons learned in the Devier case can have applications
far beyond the sick world of sexual murder. Whether it’s
embezzlement, public corruption, a mob investigation, a fencing
scheme, or a corrupt union you have to penetrate, it doesn’t
matter; the principles are going to be the same. What I would
advise in any of these types of cases would be to target whomever
you deem to be the “weakest link,” figure out a way to bring him
in and let him see what he’s up against, then win his cooperation
in going after the others.
In any kind of conspiracy case, this is a critical issue. What
you want to do is flip one guy to be a government witness, then
watch the whole house of cards come tumbling down. e
choice of whom to approach first is so important because if you
pick the wrong guy and then can’t flip him, he’s going to tip off
everyone else and you’re back at square one.
Let’s say we’re investigating a big-city public corruption case
in which we suspect eight or ten people are involved from one
particular agency. And let’s say the number one or two man in
the agency is the best “catch.” But when we profile the guy, we
find that he has his personal act together despite the corruption.
He isn’t a boozer or a womanizer; in fact, he’s a strong family
man—no illnesses, no money problems, no obvious
vulnerabilities. If he’s approached by the FBI, there’s a good
chance he’d simply deny everything, tell us to go to hell, and alert
the others.
e way you get to someone like this is to go through the
smaller fish, just as with organized crime. As we go through all
the records, maybe one candidate will stand out from the rest for
our purposes. He isn’t a higher-up, but a clerk who fixes all the
paperwork. He’s been at his job for twenty years, so everything
he has is invested in it. He has financial and medical problems,
both of which provide strong vulnerabilities.
Next comes the choice of who is “cast” to lead the
interrogation. My preference is usually for someone a little older
and more authoritative than the subject, a sharp dresser with a
commanding appearance, someone who can be friendly and
outgoing and make the subject relax, but become absolutely
serious and directed as soon as circumstances call for it.
If there’s a holiday coming up in the next few weeks, or
perhaps the subject’s birthday or anniversary, I advise postponing
the interrogation to take advantage of that. If you get him in the
room and he realizes that, if he doesn’t cooperate, this might be
the last holiday season he’ll be spending with his family, that can
give you some added leverage.
“Staging” can be just as effective in dealing with a nonviolent
offender as it was in the Stoner murder case. For any large or
ongoing investigation, I suggest concentrating all of your
materials into one place, whether or not this was actually done
for the case. For example, if you take over a conference room for
your “task force,” gathering all your agents, staff, and case files
together, you’ll be showing your subject just how serious you are.
If you can “decorate” the walls with, say, blowups of surveillance
photos and other signs of just how wide-ranging and official this
ongoing investigation is, the point will be driven home all the
more forcefully. A couple of video monitors playing tapes of your
targets in the act are icing on the cake.
Among my personal favorite touches are wall charts showing
the penalties each person would face if convicted. ere’s nothing
terribly profound about this, but it does tend to keep the
pressure on the subject and remind him of the stakes. I want to
get that “ass-pucker factor” as intense as I can.
I’ve always found that the late-night or early-morning hours
are often the best time to conduct an interrogation. People tend
to be more relaxed and at the same time more vulnerable. Again,
if you and your guys are working through the night, you
immediately send the message that this case is a big deal and you
are very committed to it. Another practical consideration of a
nighttime interrogation in any conspiracy case is that your
subject should not be seen by any of the others. If he thinks he’s
been “made,” then there’s not going to be any deal.
e basis of any successful deal is going to be the truth and an
appeal to your subject’s reason and common sense. All the
staging does is call attention to the key elements. If I were
conducting the interrogation of our representative subject in the
public corruption case, I might call him at home late at night
and say something like, “Sir, it’s very important that I talk to you
tonight. FBI agents are walking up to your door even as we
speak.” I would stress that he wasn’t under arrest and didn’t have
to go with the agents. But I’d strongly suggest that he accompany
them downtown because he might not have another chance.
ere would be no need to Mirandize him at this point because
he isn’t being charged with anything.
Once he arrived at the office, I’d let him cool his heels a while.
When the other football team has to make a long-yardage field
goal on the last play to win the game, you call a time-out to give
their kicker time to think about it. Anyone who’s had to wait to
see the doctor before an important appointment knows how
effective this can be.
Once he was ushered into my office, I’d close the door, trying
to seem warm and friendly, very understanding, everything manto-man. I’d call the guy by name. “I want to make sure you
understand you’re not under arrest,” I’d reiterate. “You’re free to
leave any time you want and my men will drive you back home.
But I think you should listen to what I have to say. is could be
the most important date in your life.”
I might have him say the date with me to make sure we’re on
the same wavelength.
“I also want you to know that we’re aware of your medical
history and we have a nurse on stand-by.” is would be true.
One of the reasons we targeted this guy was because of this
particular vulnerability.
Now we start talking turkey. I would stress that the FBI
realizes he’s a little fish, that he’s been underpaid for what he’s
done, and that he’s not really the one we want the most. “Right
now, as you can see, we’re interviewing many of the people
involved in this case. e ship is going down; no question about
it. You can go down with it or you can reach up for the third
time before drowning and grab for a life preserver. We know
you’ve been used, manipulated, taken advantage of by others
much more powerful than you. We have a U.S. attorney standing
by to offer a real deal if you want to take it.”
As a parting shot, I would stress, “Remember, this is the only
time we’ll be able to make you this offer. I’ve got twenty agents
working this case. We can go out and arrest everyone if we have
to. Don’t you think someone will roll if you don’t? And then
you’ll go down with the ship. If you want to go down with the
big guys, that’s your choice. But tonight is the last time we’ll be
able to talk like this. Will you cooperate?”
If he does—and it really is in his best interests if he does—
then we Mirandize him and let him contact an attorney. But as a
good-faith gesture, I’d probably ask him to get on the phone and
arrange a meeting with one of the other players. You don’t want
him having second thoughts and backing out. Once you’ve got
your first guy’s commitment, the rest of the pieces start falling
into place.
e reason this works so effectively, even if you understand
our complete approach in advance, is because it’s mutually
beneficial to the investigator and the targeted subject. It’s based
on truth and tailored to the subject’s life and situation and
emotional needs. Even knowing how it was staged for maximum
impact, if I were the subject presented with this deal, I’d take it,
because it does represent my best chance. e strategy behind
this type of interrogation is the same as the one I developed for
the Stoner murder case. I keep thinking to myself, “What would
get to me?” Because everybody has a rock.
Gary Trapnell, the armed robber and airplane hijacker I
interviewed at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, is just about
as intelligent and insightful as any criminal I’ve studied. He’s the
one who was so confident in his own abilities that he assured me
he could fool any prison psychiatrist into believing he had any
given mental condition I specified. He was also confident that if
he were out of prison, he’d be able to evade the law
“You just can’t catch me,” he asserted.
“Okay, Gary,” I said hypothetically, “you’re out. And you’re
smart enough to know you have to break off all contact with
family members to keep away from the feds.
“Now I know your father was a high-ranking, decorated
military officer. You really loved and respected him. You wanted
to be like him. And your crime spree began when he died.”
I could see from his facial reaction that I was on to something;
that I’d hit a nerve.
“Your dad is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. So
suppose I have agents staking out his grave around Christmas, on
his birthday, and the anniversary of the date he died?”
In spite of himself, Trapnell broke out into a sardonic smile.
“You got me!” he announced.
Again, the reason this occurred to me was because I tried to
put myself in his place; I tried to figure out what would get to
me. And my experience tells me that there is a way to get to
everyone, if you can only figure out what it is.
In my own case, it might be something similar to what I
would have used on Trapnell; that is, a particular date might be
the emotional trigger.
My sister Arlene had a beautiful blonde daughter named Kim.
She was born on my birthday, June 18, and I always felt a special
bond with her. When she was sixteen, Kim died in her sleep. We
were never able to find out the exact cause. To compound the
pain and joy of her memory, it happens that my eldest daughter,
Erika—now college age—looks very much like Kim. I’m sure
that Arlene never sees Erika without seeing Kim in her mind,
picturing what Kim would have grown up to become. My
mother feels the same way.
If I were to target me, for instance, I’d plan the approach right
before my birthday. I’m emotionally up, looking forward to the
celebration with my family. But I’m also thinking about my
niece, Kim—the birthday we shared, how much she resembles
Erika—and I’m going to be feeling vulnerable. If I happen to see
photographs of the two girls on the wall, I’m likely to come even
more unglued.
It doesn’t matter that I know what the overall strategy is in
approaching me. It doesn’t matter that I’m the one who came up
with it. If the triggering stressor is a legitimate, valid concern, it
will have a good chance of working. is one could be mine.
Yours would be something else and we’d have to try to figure out
in advance what it would be. But there would be something.
Because everybody has a rock.
11
Atlanta
In the winter of 1981, Atlanta was a city under siege.
It had begun quietly a year and a half earlier, almost
unnoticed. Before it was over—if in fact it will ever be over—it
had become one of the largest and perhaps one of the most
publicized manhunts in American history, politicizing a town
and polarizing a nation, every step of the investigation steeped in
bitter controversy.
On July 28, 1979, police responded to a complaint of a foul
odor in the woods off Niskey Lake Road and discovered the body
of thirteen-year-old Alfred Evans. He’d been missing for three
days. While examining the site, police discovered another body
about fifty feet away—this one partially decomposed—belonging
to fourteen-year-old Edward Smith, who had disappeared four
days before Alfred. Both boys were black. e medical examiner
determined that Alfred Evans had probably been strangled, while
Edward Smith had definitely been shot with a .22-caliber
weapon.
On November 8, the body of nine-year-old Yusef Bell was
discovered in an abandoned school. He had been missing since
late October and had also been strangled. Eight days later,
fourteen-year-old Milton Harvey’s body was found near Redwine
Road and Desert Drive in the East Point section of Atlanta. He
had been reported missing in early September, and as with Alfred
Evans, no definite cause of death could be determined. Both of
these children were also black. But there wasn’t enough similar
evidence to attach any particular significance. Unfortunately, in a
city the size of Atlanta, children disappear all the time. Some of
them are found dead.
On the morning of March 5, 1980, a twelve-year-old girl
named Angel Lanier set out for school but never arrived. Five
days later her body was found, bound and gagged with an
electrical cord, on the side of a road. She was fully clothed,
including her underwear, but another pair of panties had been
stuffed in her mouth. Cause of death was determined to be
ligature strangulation. e medical examiner found no evidence
of sexual assault.
Eleven-year-old Jeffrey Mathis disappeared on March 12. At
this point, the Atlanta Police Department still hadn’t made
anything out of six black children either missing or turning up
dead. ere were as many differences as similarities among the
cases, and they hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that
some or all of them might be related.
But other people had. On April 15, Yusef Bell’s mother,
Camille, aligned with other parents of missing and slain black
children and announced the formation of the Committee to Stop
Children’s Murders. ey pleaded for official help and
recognition of what they saw going on around them. is wasn’t
supposed to be happening in Atlanta, the cosmopolitan capital of
the New South. is was a city on the move, the town
supposedly “too busy to hate,” which boasted a black mayor in
Maynard Jackson and a black public safety commissioner in Lee
Brown.
e horrors didn’t stop. On May 19, fourteen-year-old Eric
Middlebrook was found murdered about a quarter mile from his
home. Death was caused by blunt-force trauma to the head. On
June 9, twelve-year-old Christopher Richardson disappeared.
And on June 22, the second young girl, eight-year-old LaTonya
Wilson, was abducted from her bedroom in the early hours of a
Sunday morning. Two days later, ten-year-old Aaron Wyche’s
body was found beneath a bridge in DeKalb County. He died of
asphyxia and a broken neck. Anthony “Tony” Carter, nine, was
found behind a warehouse on Wells Street on July 6, facedown in
the grass, dead of multiple stab wounds. From the absence of
blood at the scene, it was clear his body had been moved from
another location.
e pattern could no longer be ignored. Public Safety
Commissioner Brown set up the Missing and Murdered Task
Force, which would ultimately include more than fifty members.
Yet on it went. Earl Terrell, ten, was reported missing on July 31
off Redwine Road, near where Milton Harvey’s body had been
found. And when twelve-year-old Clifford Jones was found dead
by ligature strangulation in an alley off Hollywood Road, the
police finally accepted a connection and stated that the
investigation would now be conducted under the assumption
that the murders of black children were related.
Up until this point, the FBI had no jurisdiction to enter a case
that for all its hideous enormity remained a series of local crimes.
A break came with Earl Terrell’s disappearance. His family had
received several telephone calls demanding a ransom for the safe
return of their son. e caller indicated that Earl had been taken
to Alabama. e presumed crossing of state lines brought the
federal kidnapping statute into effect and allowed the FBI to
investigate. But it soon became clear that the ransom calls had
been a hoax. Hopes faded for Earl’s life and the FBI had to back
out.
Another boy, eleven-year-old Darron Glass, was reported
missing on September 16. Mayor Maynard Jackson asked the
White House for help—specifically, to have the FBI conduct a
major investigation into the Atlanta child murders and
disappearances. With jurisdiction still very much an issue, Att.
Gen. Griffin Bell ordered the FBI to begin an investigation of
whether the children who had not been found were being held in
violation of the federal kidnapping statute; in other words, was
there an interstate character to the crimes? As an added
responsibility, the Atlanta Field Office was charged with
determining if the cases were, in fact, linked. In effect but not in
so many words, the Bureau was given the message: solve the cases
and find the killer, as quickly as possible.
Life on the farm. How I spent my summers in high school; posing with one of my
early clients. (photo by Jack Douglas)
e big game against Wantagh High—the first time I really tried to apply
“psychological profiling” against an opponent. I am easy to spot on the Hempstead
bench—wearing the Hannibal Lecter-like face mask, having broken my nose in a
previous game. (photo by Jack Douglas)
A portrait of the agent as a young man. My first trip back home after joining the
Bureau, posing with my badge and one of the new suits my father bought me. Note
also the FBI regulation haircut. is was a rare moment of smiling on this trip. I spent
most of the Christmas 1970 vacation memorizing the manual of Bureau
communications for Assistant Director Joe Casper. (photo by Jack Douglas)
Graduation from the 107th Session of the FBI National Academy, December 16,
1976. From left to right: me, Pam, FBI Director Clarence Kelley, my mother Dolores,
and my father Jack. (FBI photo)
Milwaukee. A photo used in SWAT and hostage-rescue training showing positions at
the moment Joe Del Campo fired the shot that ended the Jacob Cohen murderhostage drama. (FBI training photo)
e first generation, January 1978. Just seven months after I joined the Behavioral
Science Unit in Quantico, I posed with some of the living legends. From left to right:
Bob Ressler; Tom O’Malley, who taught sociology; me; Dick Harper, who also taught
sociology; Jim Reese, the profiler who went on to become our expert on stress; Dick
Ault and Howard Teten, who taught applied criminology and began the FBI’s profiling
program. (FBI photo)
e next generation, June 1995. e Investigative Support Unit. From left to right:
Steve Mardigian, Pete Smerick, Clint Van Zandt, Jana Monroe, Jud Ray, me
(kneeling), Jim Wright, Greg Cooper, Gregg McCrary. Not pictured are Larry
Ankrom, Steve Etter, Bill Hagmaier, and Tom Salp. (photo by Mark Olshaker)
Special Agent John Conway and I interview Edmund Kemper at Vacaville.
Wayne D. Williams, during his 1982 murder trial in the Atlanta child murders case. I
advised Assistant D.A. Jack Mallard on what would be the best strategy for bringing
out a side of the personality Williams managed to keep hidden from the jury.
(AP/Wide World Photo)
Robert Hansen, the Anchorage, Alaska, baker, who graduated from hunting game to
hunting local prostitutes he’d abducted and set loose in the woods. (Alaska State
Troopers photo)
e trophy room of Robert Hansen showing his take before he escalated into human
game. (Alaska State Troopers photo)
e “Last Will and Testament” of seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith—probably the
greatest and most moving testament of courage, faith, and character I have seen in my
twenty-five years in law enforcement.
Larry Gene Bell, convicted of killing Shari Faye Smith and Debra May Helmick in
South Carolina. When I interrogated him in Lexington County Sheriff Jim Metts’s
office, he denied that “the Larry Gene Bell sitting here” could have committed such
crimes, but admitted that “the bad Larry Gene Bell” could have. (Lexington County,
South Carolina. Sheriff’s Department photo)
A typical case consultation. Gregg McCrary presents details of the series of prostitute
murders in Rochester, New York, to colleagues in the Investigative Support Unit. is
investigation and McCrary’s proactive strategies helped Rochester and New York State
police find and arrest Arthur Shawcross, who was tried and convicted of ten of the
murders. From left to right are Jim Wright, Gregg McCrary, me, and Steve Etter.
(photo by Mark Olshaker)
In organizing our rigorous training program for new members of the Investigative
Support Unit, we received the generous cooperation of some outstanding forensic and
law enforcement organizations. Here, Jud Ray and I present a plaque of appreciation to
Lt. Donald Stephenson, Commanding Officer of the New York Police Department
Crime Scene Unit, for the department’s help in training our people on-scene. (New
York Police Department photo)
An example of a proactive technique. In certain types of cases, after developing the
profile, we will often “go public” through the local media, hoping that someone will
e the
media,
of course,
had seized
the frenzy.
eJournal)
growing
recognize
description
of the UNSUB
and comeon
forward.
(e Fairfax
gallery of young black faces published regularly in the
newspapers became a proclamation of collective municipal guilt.
Was this a conspiracy to commit genocide on the black
population, targeting its most vulnerable members? Was this the
Klan or Nazi Party or some other hate group set to make its
stand a decade and a half after the major civil rights legislation?
Was this simply one crazed individual with a personal mission to
kill young children? is last possibility seemed the least likely.
ese kids were falling victim at an incredibly rapid rate. And
while to date, the overwhelming majority of serial killers had
been white, almost never did they hunt outside their own race.
Serial murder is a personal crime, not a political one.
But this did give the FBI another possible legitimacy in the
case. If the interstate kidnapping angle didn’t pan out, we were
still charged with determining if this fit the 44 Classification:
violation of federal civil rights.
By the time Roy Hazelwood and I went down to Atlanta,
there were sixteen cases with no end in sight. By then the
Bureau’s involvement had an official case name: ATKID, also
designated Major Case 30, though there was little public fanfare
when the FBI came in. e Atlanta police didn’t want anyone
stealing their show, and the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office didn’t want
to create expectations they might not be able to meet.
Roy Hazelwood was the logical choice to join me in Atlanta.
Of all the Behavioral Science Unit instructors, Roy was doing the
most profiling, teaching the National Academy course on
interpersonal violence and taking on many of the rape cases that
came to the unit. Our primary goals were to determine for
ourselves if the cases were linked, and if so, was there a
conspiracy?
We reviewed the voluminous case files—crime-scene photos,
descriptions of what each child was wearing when found,
statements from witnesses in the area, autopsy protocols. We
interviewed family members of the children to see if there was a
common victimology. e police drove us around the
neighborhoods where the children had disappeared and took us
to each of the body dump sites.
Without talking over our impressions with each other, Roy
and I both took psychometric tests, administered by a forensic
psychologist, which we filled out as if each of us were the killer.
e test involved motivation, background, and family life—the
types of things we’d put into a profile. e doctor who
administered the test was amazed that our results were nearly
identical.
And what we had to say wasn’t aimed at winning any
popularity contests.
First, we didn’t think these were Klan-type hate crimes.
Second, we were almost positive the offender was black. And
third, while many of the deaths and disappearances were related,
not all of them were.
e Georgia Bureau of Investigation had received several tips
about Ku Klux Klan involvement, but we discounted them. If
you study hate crimes going all the way back to the early days of
the nation, you find that they tend to be highly public, highly
symbolic acts. A lynching is intended to make a public statement
and create a public display. Such a crime or other racial murder is
an act of terrorism, and for it to have an effect, it must be highly
visible. Ku Klux Klansmen don’t wear white sheets to fade into
the woodwork. If a hate group had targeted black children
throughout the Atlanta area, it wouldn’t have been content to let
months go by before the police and the public figured out
something was going on. We would have expected bodies strung
up on Main Street, USA, and the message would have been none
too subtle. We didn’t see any of that type of behavior in these
cases.
e body dump sites were in predominantly or exclusively
black areas of the city. A white individual, much less a white
group, could not have prowled these neighborhoods without
being noticed. e police had canvassed extensively and had no
reports of whites near any of the children or dump sites. ese
areas had street activity around the clock, so even under the cover
of night, a white man could not have been around there
completely unnoticed. is also fit in with our experience that
sexual killers tend to target their own race. Even though there
was no clear evidence of sexual molestation, these crimes
definitely fit a sexual pattern.
ere was a strong link among many of the victims. ey
were young and outgoing and streetwise, but inexperienced and
rather naive about the world beyond their neighborhood. We felt
this was the type of child who would be susceptible to a come-on
or ruse or con from the right individual. at individual would
have to have a car, since the children were taken away from the
abduction sites. And we felt he would have to have some aura of
adult authority. Many of these kids lived in conditions of obvious
poverty. In some of the houses we found no electricity or
running water.
Because of that and the children’s relative lack of
sophistication, I didn’t think it would take much of a lure. To
test this, we had Atlanta undercover officers go into these areas,
often posing as workmen, and offer a child five dollars to come
with him to do some job. ey tried it with black officers and
with white officers and it didn’t seem to matter. ese kids were
so desperate for survival, they’d do just about anything for five
dollars. It wasn’t going to take someone all that sharp to get to
them. e one other thing the experiment showed was that white
men were noticed in these neighborhoods.
But as I said, while we did find a strong linkage, it didn’t seem
to apply to all the cases. After carefully evaluating the victims and
the circumstances, I didn’t think the two girls had been killed by
the primary offender, or even by the same person as each other.
e manner of LaTonya Wilson’s abduction from her bedroom
was too specialized. Of the boys, I thought most of the “soft
kills”—the strangulations—were related, not necessarily all the
unknown causes of death. And other aspects of the evidence led
us to believe we weren’t dealing with a single killer. Strong
evidence in a couple of the cases suggested the killer had been a
member of the victim’s family, but when FBI director William
Webster announced this publicly, he was slam-dunked by the
press. Aside from the obvious political problems with such a
statement, any case separated from the Missing and Murdered
list made that family ineligible to receive any of the funds that
were starting to be contributed by groups and individuals around
the country.
Even though we felt more than one person was responsible,
we felt we were dealing with one particular individual who was
on a tear, and he would keep killing until he was found. Roy and
I profiled a black male, single, between the ages of twenty-five
and twenty-nine. He would be a police buff, drive a police-type
vehicle, and somewhere along the way he would insinuate
himself into the investigation. He would have a police-type dog,
either a German shepherd or a Doberman. He would not have a
girlfriend, he would be sexually attracted to the young boys, but
we weren’t seeing any signs of rape or other overt sexual abuse.
is, I thought, spoke to his sexual inadequacy. He would have
some kind of ruse or con with these kids. I was betting on
something having to do with music or performing. He would
have a good line, but he couldn’t produce. At some point early in
each relationship, the kid would reject him, or he would at least
perceive it that way, and he would feel compelled to kill.
Atlanta PD checked all known pedophiles and sexual “priors,”
eventually getting down to a list of about fifteen hundred
possible suspects. Police officers and FBI agents visited schools,
interviewing children to see if any of them had been approached
by adult males and hadn’t told their parents or the police. And
they rode buses, passing out flyers with the missing children’s
photos, asking if anybody had seen them, particularly in the
company of men. ey had undercover officers hanging out at
gay bars trying to overhear conversations and pick up leads.
Not everyone agreed with us. And not everyone was happy to
have us down there. At one of the crime scenes in an abandoned
apartment house, one black cop came up to me and said, “You’re
Douglas, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“I saw your profile. It’s a piece of shit.” I wasn’t sure whether
he was actually evaluating my work or pointing up the
newspapers’ frequent claim that there were no black serial killers.
is wasn’t exactly true. We had had cases of black serial killers of
both prostitutes and members of their own families, but not
much in the way of stranger murders, and none with the modus
operandi we were seeing here.
“Look, I don’t have to be here,” I said. “I didn’t ask to come.”
At any rate, the frustration level was high. Everyone involved
wanted the case solved, but everyone wanted to crack it himself.
As was often true, Roy and I knew we were down there to take
some of the flak and be blamed if everything hit the fan.
Aside from the Klan conspiracy scenario, all kinds of theories
were floating around, some more bizarre than others. Various
children were found missing various articles of clothing, but
none identical. Was this killer outfitting his own mannequin at
home the way Ed Gein had tried collecting sections of women’s
skin? On the later kills, was the UNSUB evolving by leaving
bodies more out in the open? Or was it possible the original
UNSUB had committed suicide and a copycat had taken over for
him?
To me, the first real break came when I was back in Quantico.
A call had come in to the police department in Conyers, a small
town about twenty miles from Atlanta. ey thought they might
finally have a lead. I listened to the tape in Larry Monroe’s office,
along with Dr. Park Dietz. Before becoming Behavioral Science
Unit chief, Monroe had been one of the outstanding instructors
at Quantico. Like Ann Burgess, Park Dietz had been brought to
the unit by Roy Hazelwood. He was at Harvard at the time and
just starting to get a reputation in law enforcement circles. Now
based in California, Park is probably the foremost forensic
psychiatrist in the country and a frequent consultant to our unit.
e caller on the tape professed to be the Atlanta child killer
and mentioned the name of the most recent known victim. He
was obviously white, sounded like a typical redneck, and
promised he was “going to kill more of these nigger kids.” He
also named a particular spot along Sigmon Road in Rockdale
County where police could find another body.
I remember the excitement in the room, which I’m afraid I
squelched. “is is not the killer,” I declared, “but you have to
catch him because he’ll keep calling and be a pain in the ass and a
distracting force as long as he’s out there.”
Despite the police excitement, I felt confident I was right
about this jerk. I’d had a similar situation shortly before this
when Bob Ressler and I had been over in England to teach a
course at Bramshill, the British police academy (and their
equivalent to Quantico) about an hour outside London. England
was in the midst of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. e killer, who
apparently patterned himself after the Whitechapel murderer of
late Victorian times, was bludgeoning and stabbing women up
north, mostly prostitutes. ere had been eight deaths so far.
ree more women had managed to escape, but could provide
no description. e age-range estimates ran from early teens to
late fifties. Like Atlanta, all of England was gripped in terror. It
was the largest manhunt in British history. e police would
ultimately conduct nearly a quarter million individual interviews
throughout the country.
Police departments and newspapers had received letters from
“Jack the Ripper,” confessing to the crimes. en a two-minute
tape cassette arrived in the mail to Chief Inspector George
Oldfield, taunting the police and promising to strike again. As in
the Atlanta case, this seemed to be the big breakthrough. e
tape was copied and played throughout the country—on
television and radio, on toll-free telephone lines, over the PA at
soccer matches—to see if anyone could recognize the voice.
We had been told that John Domaille was at Bramshill while
we were there. He’s a big-shot cop and the lead investigator on
the Ripper cases. He’s told that these two profiling guys from the
FBI are here and maybe we should get together. So after class,
Bob and I are sitting alone in the academy pub when this guy
comes in, is recognized by someone at the bar, and goes over and
starts talking to him. We can read his nonverbals and know he’s
making fun of the blokes from the U.S. I say to Ressler, “I bet
that’s him.”
Sure enough, we’re pointed out to him, he and the other guys
come over to our table, and he introduces himself. I say, “I
noticed you didn’t bring any files with you.”
He starts making excuses about how complicated a case this is
and it would be difficult to bring us up to speed in a short
amount of time and such like that.
“Fine,” I reply. “We’ve got plenty of cases of our own. I’d just
as soon sit here and drink.”
is take-it-or-leave-it approach gets the Brits interested. One
of them asks what we would need to profile a case. I tell him to
start by just describing the scenes. He tells me that the UNSUB
seems to get the women in a vulnerable position and then blitzes
them with a knife or hammer. He mutilates them after death.
e voice on the tape was pretty articulate and sophisticated for a
prostitute killer. So I say, “Based on the crime scenes you’ve
described and this audiotape I heard back in the States, that’s not
the Ripper. You’re wasting your time with that.”
I explained that the killer he was looking for would not
communicate with the police. He’d be an almost invisible loner
in his late twenties or early thirties with a pathological hatred of
women, a school dropout, and possibly a truck driver since he
seemed to get around quite a bit. His killing of prostitutes was
his attempt to punish women in general.
Despite the fortune of time and resources they’d spent on
getting this tape out, Domaille said, “You know, I was worried
about that,” and later changed the course of his investigation.
When thirty-five-year-old truck driver Peter Sutcliffe was arrested
on a fluke on January 2, 1981—in the midst of the Atlanta
horrors—and was proved to be the Ripper, he bore little
resemblance to the one who had made and sent the tape. e
impostor turned out to be a retired policeman who had a grudge
to settle with Inspector Oldfield.
After listening to the Georgia tape, I spoke to the Conyers
and Atlanta police and, off the top of my head, came up with a
scenario I thought would take out this impostor. Like the
Ripper’s, this guy’s tone was taunting and superior. “From the
tone of his voice and what he’s saying, he thinks you’re all dumb
shits,” I said, “so let’s use this.”
I advised them to play as dumb as he thought they were. Go
to Sigmon Road but search the opposite side of the street; miss
him completely. He’ll be watching and maybe you’ll get lucky
and grab him right there. If not, he’ll at least call and tell you
what idiots you are, that you’re looking in the wrong place. Park
Dietz loves this, assimilating this off-the-cuff field stuff into his
academic knowledge.
e police make a very public show of looking for this body,
screw up the directions, and sure enough, the guy calls back to
tell them how stupid they are. ey’re ready with the trap and
trace and get this older redneck right in his house. Just to make
sure he’s not on the level, they search the right area of Sigmon
Road, but of course there’s no body.
e Conyers incident wasn’t the only red herring in this case.
Large investigations often have a fair number of them, and
Atlanta was no exception. Close to the road, in the woods near
where the earliest skeletonized remains were found, detectives
discovered a girlie magazine with semen on some of the pages.
e FBI lab was able to lift latent fingerprints and from that get
an ID. It’s a white male who drives a van and he’s an
exterminator. e psychological symbolism, of course, is perfect.
For this type of sociopath, it’s only one small step from
exterminating bugs to exterminating black children. We already
know that many serial killers return to crime scenes and dump
sites. e police speculate that he pulls along the side of the road
in his car, looks out over his conquest, and masturbates as he
recalls the thrill of the hunt and kill.
is development works its way up to the director of the FBI,
to the attorney general, all the way to the White House. All of
them are anxiously waiting to make the announcement that
we’ve got the Atlanta child killer. A press release is being
prepared. But a couple of things bother me. For one thing, he’s
white. For another, he’s happily married. I figure there must be
another reason why this guy was there.
ey bring him in for questioning. He denies everything.
ey show him the magazine with semen stuck to the pages.
ey tell him they’ve got his prints on it. Okay, he admits, I was
driving along and I threw it out of the car. is doesn’t make any
sense, either. He’s driving along, one hand on the wheel, the
other hand on himself, and he manages to throw this thing out
of a car so that it lands in the woods? He’d have to have an arm
like Johnny Unitas.
Realizing this is a serious jam he’s in, he admits that his wife is
pregnant, due any day, and he hasn’t had sex in months. Rather
than even think of cheating on this woman he loves, who’s about
to bear his child, he went down to the 7-Eleven, bought this
magazine, then thought he’d go out into these isolated woods on
his lunch hour and gain some relief.
My heart went out to this guy. Nothing is sacred! He figures
he’ll go off where he won’t bother anybody, mind his own
business, and now even the president of the United States knows
he was jacking off in the woods!
When they caught the impostor in Conyers, I thought that
would be that; at least we’d been able to get this racist ass out of
the way so the police could concentrate on their investigation.
But I hadn’t factored one thing in properly, and that was the
active role of the press. Since then, I’ve made sure never to
commit that oversight again.
One thing I had realized was that, at a certain point, the vast
media attention the child murders were getting became a
satisfaction to the killer in its own right. What I hadn’t counted
on was that he would be reacting specifically to media reports.
What happened was the press was so hungry for any possible
break in the case that they heavily covered the police search along
Sigmon Road, which came up empty. But soon afterward,
another body is found in open view along Sigmon Road in
Rockdale County: that of fifteen-year-old Terry Pue.
To me, this is an incredibly significant development and the
beginning of the strategy for how to catch the killer. What it
means is, he’s closely following the press and reacting to what
they’re reporting. He knows the police aren’t going to find a body
on Sigmon Road because he didn’t put one there. But now he’s
showing how superior he is, how he can manipulate the press and
the police. He’s showing his arrogance and contempt. He can
dump a body along Sigmon Road if he wants to! He’s broken his
pattern and driven twenty or thirty miles just to play this game.
We know he’s watching, so let’s see if we can use that to
manipulate his behavior.
Had I known this or considered the possibility beforehand, I
would have thought about staking out the general area along
Sigmon Road. But it was too late for that now. We had to look
forward and see what we could do.
I had several ideas. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. were
coming to Atlanta to give a benefit concert at the Omni to raise
money for families of the victims. e event was receiving
tremendous coverage, and I was absolutely certain the killer
would be there. e challenge was, how to pick him out of
twenty-odd thousand people?
Roy Hazelwood and I had profiled a police buff. at could
be the key. “Let’s give him a free ticket,” I suggested.
As usual, the police and Atlanta Field Office agents looked at
me as if I were crazy. So I explained. We’ll advertise that because
so many people are expected, additional security guards will be
needed. We’ll offer minimum wage, require that each applicant
must have his own vehicle (since we knew our guy had one), and
those with some kind of background or experience with law
enforcement will be given preference. We have the screening
interviews at the Omni, using hidden closed-circuit television.
We’ll eliminate the groups we don’t care about—women, older
people, etc.—and concentrate mainly on young black men. Each
one will fill out an application, on which we’ll have them list
experience such as ambulance driving, whether they’ve ever
applied for a police or security job before, all the things that will
help us qualify our suspect. We can probably get down to a
group of maybe ten or twelve individuals that we can then crosscheck against the other evidence.
is idea went right up the line to the assistant attorney
general. e problem is, anytime you have a large organization
working on anything that isn’t right out of the book, “analysis
paralysis” can set in. By the time my strategy was finally
approved, it was the day before the concert and the feeble
attempt to recruit “security guards” at that point was too little,
too late.
I had another scheme. I wanted to have wooden crosses made
up, about a foot high. Some would be given to families, others
would be placed at crime scenes as memorials. One large one
could be erected at a church in collective memory of the
children. Once this was publicized, I knew the killer would visit
some of the sites, particularly the remote ones. He might even try
to take one of the crosses. If we had key sites surveilled, I thought
we’d have a good chance of nabbing him.
But it took the Bureau weeks to okay the plan. en there was
a turf war over who got to make the crosses—should it be the
FBI exhibit section in Washington, the carpentry shop at
Quantico, or should the Atlanta Field Office contract it out? e
crosses did eventually get made, but by the time they were
usable, events in the case had overtaken us.
By February, the city was about out of control. Psychics were
swarming around, all giving their own “profiles,” many
dramatically contradicting each other. e press was jumping on
any possibility, quoting anyone remotely related to the case who
would talk. e next victim to turn up after Terry Pue’s body was
found along Sigmon Road was twelve-year-old Patrick Baltazar,
off Buford Highway in DeKalb County. Like Terry Pue, he had
been strangled. At that time, someone in the medical examiner’s
office announced that hair and fibers found on Patrick Baltazar’s
body matched those found on five of the previous victims. ese
were among the ones I had linked together as having the same
killer. e announcement of the forensic findings received widescale coverage.
And something clicked with me. He’s going to start dumping
bodies in the river. Now he knows they’re getting hair and fiber.
One previous body, that of Patrick Rogers, had been found on
the Cobb County side of the Chattahoochee River in December,
a victim of blunt-force trauma to the head. But Patrick was
fifteen, five foot nine, and 145 pounds, a school dropout who
had been in trouble with the law. e police were not
considering his case related. Whether he was or not, though, I
felt the killer would come to the river now, where the water
would wash away any trace evidence.
We’ve got to start surveilling the rivers, I said, particularly the
Chattahoochee, the major waterway that forms the northwestern
boundary of the city with neighboring Cobb County. But several
police jurisdictions were involved, one for each county, as well as
the FBI, and no one could take overall charge. By the time a
joint surveillance operation composed of FBI and Homicide Task
Force personnel was organized and approved, it was already into
April.
But in the meantime, I wasn’t surprised when the next body
found—thirteen-year-old Curtis Walker—showed up in the
South River. e next two—Timmie Hill, thirteen, and Eddie
Duncan, the oldest at twenty-one—appeared within a day of
each other in the Chattahoochee. Unlike the previous victims,
most of whom had been found fully clothed, these three bodies
had been stripped to their underwear, another way of removing
hair and fiber.
Weeks went by with the surveillance teams in place, watching
bridges and potential dump sites along the river. But nothing was
happening. It was clear the authorities were losing faith and felt
as if they were getting nowhere. With no clear progress being
made, the operation was scheduled to be shut down at the 6 A.M.
shift change on May 22.
At about 2:30 that very morning, a police academy recruit
named Bob Campbell was on his final surveillance shift on the
bank of the Chattahoochee beneath the Jackson Parkway Bridge.
He saw a car drive across and apparently stop briefly in the
middle.
“I just heard a loud splash!” he reported tensely into his
walkie-talkie. He directed his flashlight into the water and saw
the ripples. e car turned around and came back across the
bridge where a stakeout car followed it and then pulled it over. It
was a 1970 Chevy station wagon and the driver was a short,
curly-haired, twenty-three-year-old, very light black man named
Wayne Bertram Williams. He was cordial and cooperative. He
claimed to be a music promoter and said he lived with his
parents. Police questioned him and looked into his car before
letting him go. But they didn’t lose track of him.
Two days later, the nude body of twenty-seven-year-old
Nathaniel Cater surfaced downstream, not far from where the
body of Jimmy Ray Payne, twenty-one, had been found a month
earlier. ere wasn’t enough evidence to arrest Williams and get a
search warrant, but he was put under “bumper lock” surveillance.
He soon became aware of the police following him and led
them on wild-goose chases throughout the city. He even drove to
Safety Commissioner Lee Brown’s home and started honking his
horn. He had a darkroom in his house, and before a warrant
could be obtained, he was observed burning photographs in his
backyard. He also washed out the car.
Wayne Williams fit our profile in every key respect, including
his ownership of a German shepherd. He was a police buff who
had been arrested some years earlier for impersonating a law
officer. After that, he had driven a surplus police vehicle and used
police scanners to get to crime scenes to take pictures. In
retrospect, several witnesses recalled seeing him along Sigmon
Road when the police were reacting to the phone tip and
searching for the nonexistent body. He had been taking
photographs there, which he offered to the police. We also found
out that he had, indeed, attended the benefit concert at the
Omni.
Without arresting him, the FBI asked him to come to the
office, where he was cooperative and didn’t ask for an attorney.
From reports I received, I didn’t feel that the interrogation had
been properly planned or organized. It had been too heavyhanded and direct. And I thought he was reachable at that point.
After the interview, I was told he hung around the office and
acted as if he still wanted to talk about police and FBI stuff. But
when he left that day, I knew they would never get a confession
out of him. He agreed to a polygraph, which proved
inconclusive. Later, when police and FBI agents got a warrant
and searched the house he shared with his retired-schoolteacher
parents, they found books that showed how to beat a lie detector.
at warrant was obtained on June 3. Despite Williams’s
having washed out the car, police found hair and fiber linking
him with about twelve of the murders, the exact ones I had
profiled as being done by the same killer.
e evidence was compelling. Not only did they get fibers
linking the bodies to Williams’s room and house and car, Larry
Peterson of the Georgia State Crime Lab matched fibers from
clothing some of the victims had worn on occasions prior to their
disappearance. In other words, there was a connection to
Williams before some of the murders.
On June 21, Wayne B. Williams was arrested for the murder
of Nathaniel Cater. e investigation into the other deaths
continued. Bob Ressler and I were at the Hampton Inn, near
Newport News, Virginia, speaking before a meeting of the
Southern States Correctional Association, when the arrest was
announced. I was just back from England and the Yorkshire
Ripper case, and I was talking about my work on serial murder.
Back in March, People magazine had run a story about Ressler
and me and that we were tracking the Atlanta killer. In the
article, which headquarters had directed us to cooperate with, I’d
given elements of the profile, particularly our opinion that the
UNSUB was black. e story had gotten a lot of attention
nationally. So when I took questions from this audience of more
than five hundred people, someone asked my opinion of the
Williams arrest.
I gave some of the background on the case and our
involvement with it and how we had come up with the profile. I
said he fit the profile and added carefully that if it did turn out to
be him, I thought he “looked pretty good for a good percentage
of the killings.”
I didn’t know the questioner was a reporter, though I’m sure I
would have answered the same even if I had. e next day I was
quoted in the Newport News-Hampton Daily Press as saying, “He
looks pretty good for a good percentage of the killings,” leaving
out my critically important qualifying statement before that.
e story hit the news wire, and the next day I was being
quoted all over the country, on all the network news programs, in
all the major newspapers, including a story in the Atlanta
Constitution with the headline “FBI Man: Williams May Have
Slain Many.”
I was getting calls from everywhere. ere were television
cameras in the hotel lobby and in the hallway outside my room.
Ressler and I had to climb down the fire escape to get out.
Back at headquarters, the shit was hitting the fan. It looked
like an FBI agent intimately involved with the case had declared
Wayne Williams guilty without a trial. Driving back to
Quantico, I tried to explain to Unit Chief Larry Monroe on the
mobile telephone what had really happened. He and the assistant
director, Jim McKenzie, tried to help me out and run
interference with OPR, the FBI’s Office of Professional
Responsibility.
I remember I was sitting in the upper floor of the library at
Quantico where I used to go to write my profiles in peace and
quiet. It also had the advantage of windows to look out of, unlike
our subterranean offices. Monroe and McKenzie came up to talk
to me. ey were both big supporters of mine. I was the only one
doing profiling full-time, I was completely burnt out from
running all over the place, Atlanta had been a huge emotional
drain, and the thanks I got for all of it was the threat of a censure
for this statement that was picked up out of context by the
media.
We had scored a major triumph for the art of profiling and
criminal investigative analysis with this case. Our evaluation of
the UNSUB and what he would do next was right on the money.
Everyone was watching us, from the White House on down. I
had stuck my neck way out, and if I’d screwed up or been wrong,
the program would have died.
We’d always been told that this job was high risk, high gain.
With tears in my eyes, I told Monroe and McKenzie I saw it as
“high risk, no fucking gain.” I said it just wasn’t worth it and
threw my case folders down on the table. Jim McKenzie said I
was probably right, but they just wanted to help me.
When I went to headquarters to appear before OPR, the first
thing I had to do was sign a waiver of my rights. Upholding
justice in the outside world and practicing it inside are not
necessarily the same thing. e first thing they did was whip out
the People magazine. Jackie Onassis was on the cover.
“Weren’t you warned about doing interviews like this?”
No, I said, the interview had been approved. And at the
convention, I was talking about our serial killer research in
general when someone brought up the Wayne Williams case. I
was careful about the way I phrased my reply. I couldn’t help the
way it was reported.
ey raked me over the coals for four hours. I had to write
out a statement, going over the newspaper reports and what had
happened item by item. And when I was finished, they told me
nothing and gave me no feedback on what was going to happen
to me. I felt as if I’d given the Bureau so much of myself without
any reinforcement, sacrificed so many other things, taken so
much time away from my family, and now I faced the prospect of
being censured, being “on the bricks” without pay for some
period of time, or losing my job altogether. For the next several
weeks, I literally didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.
at was when my father, Jack, wrote me a letter. In it, he
talked about the time he’d been laid off from his job with the
Brooklyn Eagle. He, too, had been depressed. He’d been working
hard, doing a good job, but also felt he had no control over his
life. He explained how he had learned to face what life throws at
you and to regroup his inner resources to fight another day. I
carried that letter around with me in my briefcase for a long
time, long after this incident was over.
After five months, OPR decided to censure me, asserting that
I had been warned after the People article not to talk to the press
about pending investigations. e letter of censure came from
Director Webster himself.
But as pissed off as I was, I didn’t have much time to stew
about it unless I was prepared to quit altogether, and whatever
my feelings about the organization were at that time, the work
itself was too important to me. I still had ongoing cases all over
the United States, and the Wayne Williams trial was coming up.
It was time to fight another day.
e Wayne Williams trial began in January 1982 after six days
of jury selection. e panel they ended up with was
predominantly black, nine women and three men. Although we
felt he was good for at least twelve of the child killings, Williams
was being tried on only two murder counts—Nathaniel Cater
and Jimmy Ray Payne. Ironically, both of these young men had
been in their twenties.
Williams was represented by a high-profile legal defense team
from Jackson, Mississippi—Jim Kitchens and Al Binder—and a
woman from Atlanta, Mary Welcome. Some of the key members
of the prosecution were Fulton County assistant district attorneys
Gordon Miller and Jack Mallard. Because of my work on the
investigative phase of the case, the district attorney’s office asked
me to come down and advise them as the trial progressed. For
most of the proceedings, I sat directly behind the prosecution
table.
If the trial were held today, I would be able to testify as to
MO, signature aspects, and case linkage, as I have in many
others. And if there was a conviction, during the penalty phase I
could give a professional opinion on the defendant’s
dangerousness in the future. But back in 1982, what we did
hadn’t yet been recognized by the courts, so I could only advise
on strategy.
Much of the prosecution’s case rested on about seven hundred
pieces of hair and fiber evidence, meticulously analyzed by Larry
Peterson and Special Agent Hal Deadman, an expert from the
FBI lab in Washington. Even though Williams was charged only
with the two murders, Georgia criminal procedure allowed the
state to bring in other linked cases, something that couldn’t be
done in Mississippi and that the defense didn’t seem prepared for.
e problem for the prosecution was that Williams was mildmannered, controlled, well-spoken, and friendly. With his thick
glasses, soft features, and delicate hands, he looked more like the
Pillsbury Doughboy than a serial killer of children. He had taken
to issuing press releases about how he was not guilty and how his
arrest was purely racial in nature. Just before the trial began, he
said in an interview, “I would compare the FBI to the Keystone
Kops and the Atlanta police to Car 54, Where Are You?”
No one on the prosecution side had any hopes that Williams
would take the stand, but I thought he might. From his behavior
during the crimes and this type of public statement, I thought he
was arrogant and self-confident enough to think he could
manipulate the trial the way he had manipulated the public, the
press, and the police.
In a closed meeting between the two sides held in Judge
Clarence Cooper’s chambers, Al Binder said they were bringing
in a prominent forensic psychologist from Phoenix named
Michael Brad Bayless to testify that Williams didn’t fit the profile
and was incapable of the murders. Dr. Bayless had conducted
three separate interview examinations with Williams.
“Fine,” Gordon Miller replied. “You bring him in and we’ll
bring in as rebuttal witness an FBI agent who’s predicted
everything that’s happened so far in this case.”
“Shit, we want to meet him,” Binder said. Miller told him I’d
been sitting behind the prosecution table for most of the trial.
But I did meet with both sides. We used the jury room. I
explained my background to the defense and told them if they
had any problems with my being an FBI agent or not being a
doctor, I could get a psychiatrist we worked with, such as Park
Dietz, to study the case, and I felt confident he would testify to
the same things.
Binder and his associates seemed fascinated by what I had to
say. ey were cordial and respectful, and Binder even told me
his son wanted to be an FBI agent.
As it turned out, Bayless never did testify. e week after the
trial ended, he told reporters for the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta
Constitution newspapers that he believed Williams was
emotionally capable of murder, that he had an “inadequate
personality,” and that, in his opinion, the motive in the murders
was “power and an obsessive need for control.” He said that
Williams “wanted me to do one of two things, and that was to
change my report and not say certain things, or not testify.” He
asserted that one of the key problems for the defense was
Williams’s insistence on controlling everything himself.
I found this all extremely interesting, in no small part because
it dovetailed so well with the profile Roy Hazelwood and I had
come up with. But during the trial I found another incident
equally interesting.
Like most of the out-of-town participants, I was staying at the
Marriott downtown near the courthouse. One night, I was eating
alone in the dining room when this distinguished-looking black
man in his mid-forties comes up to my table and introduces
himself as Dr. Brad Bayless. I tell him I know who he is and why
he’s here. He asks if he can sit down.
I tell him I think it’s a bad idea that we’re seen together if he’s
going to be testifying for the defense tomorrow. But Bayless says
he isn’t concerned about that, sits down, and asks me what I
know about him and his background, which turns out to be
quite a lot. I give him one of my minilectures on criminal
psychology and comment that if he testifies the way the defense
wants him to, he’s going to embarrass himself and his profession.
When he leaves the table, he shakes my hand and says he’d really
like to come to Quantico and take our courses. I kind of wink
and say we’ll see how you do on the stand tomorrow
e next day in court, lo and behold, I find out Dr. Bayless
has gone back to Arizona without testifying. At the bench,
Binder is complaining about the “power of the prosecution” and
how they’re scaring off his expert witnesses. I hadn’t set out to do
that, if that’s what happened, but I certainly wasn’t going to back
away when the chance fell in my lap. But what really happened, I
think, was that Dr. Bayless had too much integrity not to call it
as he saw it or to let himself be used by either side for their own
purposes.
During the prosecution’s case, Hal Deadman and Larry
Peterson had done a masterful job with the hair and fiber
evidence, but it was extremely complex stuff and by its very
nature, not a very theatrical presentation; all about how this
carpet fiber twists in this direction and that carpet fiber twists in
the other direction. Ultimately, they matched fibers from all
twelve victims to Williams’s violet and green bedspread,
connected most of them to the carpet in Williams’s bedroom,
about half to the carpet in the living room, the same number to
his 1970 Chevrolet, and in all but one case were able to make a
connection to hair from the defendant’s German shepherd,
Sheba.
When it was the defense’s turn, they had a handsome and
charming Kennedy look-alike from Kansas who smiled a lot at
the jury come in to rebut Deadman’s testimony. At the end of the
session, when the prosecution team met to go over what had
happened that day, everyone was laughing about how this goodlooking guy from Kansas had not been at all convincing.
ey came to me. “What do you think, John?”
I’d been watching the jury. I said, “Let me tell you something:
you guys are losing the case.” ey were shocked and it was the
last thing they wanted to hear.
“You may not think he was convincing,” I explained, “but the
jurors believe him.” I knew what Hal Deadman was talking
about and I still found it difficult going. e defense witnesses
may have been overly simplistic, but they were much easier to
follow.
ey were gracious enough not to tell me I was full of shit,
but, incisive profiler that I am, I realized I wasn’t wanted here. I
had a big backlog of cases waiting for me and I was preparing for
the Mary Frances Stoner murder trial. All this time on the road
was starting to take its personal toll, too. I was having marital
problems based on my lack of involvement with the family, I
wasn’t getting the exercise I thought I needed, I was stressed all
the time. I called Larry Monroe at Quantico and told him I was
coming back home.
No sooner do I get back to National Airport and drive home
than I receive a message saying the prosecution’s had second
thoughts. ey’re starting to think some of the things I said may,
in fact, be happening. ey want me to come back to Atlanta to
help them examine the defense witnesses.
So two days later I fly back again. Now they’re much more
open, asking for advice. And the big surprise to all of them is
that Wayne Williams decides to take the stand, which I’d
predicted. He’s examined by his attorney, Al Binder, who has a
deep, resonant voice. e way he hunches over as he asks
questions, he looks like a shark, which is why he has the
nickname Jaws.
He keeps making the same point to the jury. “Look at him!
Does he look like a serial killer? Look at him. Get up, Wayne,” he
says, telling him to hold out his hands. “Look how soft his hands
are. Do you think he would have the strength to kill someone, to
strangle someone with these hands?”
Binder put Williams on the stand the middle of one day and
kept him on all the next day. And Williams did a tremendous job
for himself, just as he must have known he would. He was totally
believable as the innocent victim of an embarrassed, racially
biased system that needed a suspect fast and had found one.
So the next question for the prosecution was, how are we
going to cross-examine him? Assistant District Attorney Jack
Mallard has the ticket. He’s the one on the spot. He has a low,
slow voice and a mellifluous southern accent.
I didn’t have any formal training in courtroom procedure or
examination of witnesses, but I had an instinct for what it would
take. It was really all based on the idea of “walking in the shoes.”
I asked myself, what would be upsetting to me? And the answer I
came up with was to be questioned by someone who just knew I
was guilty, regardless of what I tried to make him believe.
I said to Mallard, “Remember the old TV show is Is Your
Life?” You’ve got to do that with him. You’ve got to keep him on
the stand as long as you can, you’ve got to break him down.
Because he’s an overcontrolled, rigid personality, he’s an
obsessive-compulsive. And to get to that rigidity, you have to
keep the pressure on him, sustain the tension by going through
every aspect of his life, even stuff that doesn’t seem to mean
anything, like where he went to school. Just keep it up. en,
when you’ve worn him down, you have to physically touch him,
just like Al Binder did. What’s good for the defense is good for
the prosecution. Move in close, violate his space, and catch him
off guard. Before the defense has the opportunity to object, ask
him in a low voice, “Did you panic, Wayne, when you killed
these kids?”
And when the time comes, that’s just what Mallard does. For
the first several hours of cross-examination, he can’t rattle
Williams. He catches him up in a number of glaring
inconsistencies, but it’s the same calm, “How could it possibly be
me?” Williams. e gray-haired, gray-suited Mallard
methodically goes through his whole life, then at the right time,
he goes in close, puts his hand on Williams’s arm, and in a low,
methodical south-Georgia drawl says, “What was it like, Wayne?
What was it like when you wrapped your fingers around the
victim’s throat? Did you panic? Did you panic?”
And in a weak voice of his own, Williams says, “No.”
en he catches himself. He flies into a rage. He points his
finger at me and screams, “You’re trying your best to make me fit
that FBI profile, and I’m not going to help you do it!”
e defense goes ballistic. Williams goes nuts, ranting about
“FBI goons” and calling the prosecution team “fools.” But that
was the turning point of the trial. Jury members later said so
themselves. ey stared with their mouths open. For the first
time, they had seen the other side of Wayne Williams. ey
could see the metamorphosis before their eyes. ey could
understand the violence of which he was capable. Mallard
winked at me, then went back to hammering Williams on the
stand.
After his eruption in open court like that, I knew that he
knew his only chance was to get back some of the sympathy he’d
built up throughout the trial. I tapped Mallard on the shoulder
and said, “You watch, Jack. One week from today, Wayne’s going
to get sick.” I don’t know why I picked the one-week time frame,
but exactly one week later, the trial was interrupted and Williams
was rushed to the hospital with stomach pains. ey found
nothing wrong with him and released him.
In her statement to the jury, Williams’s attorney Mary
Welcome held up a thimble and asked them, “Are you going to
let a thimbleful of evidence convict this man?” She held up a
piece of green carpet from her office, saying how common it was.
How can you convict a man because he has green carpet?
So that day, some other agents and I went to her law firm. We
walked in, went into her office while she wasn’t there, and pulled
up some carpet fibers. We brought them back and had the
experts put them under the microscope and gave the evidence to
the prosecution, demonstrating that the fibers from her carpet
were completely different from the fibers in the carpet in the
Williams home.
On February 27, 1982, after eleven hours of deliberation, the
jury returned a guilty verdict in both murders. Wayne B.
Williams was sentenced to two consecutive life terms, which he is
serving in the Valdosta Correctional Institution in south Georgia.
He still maintains his innocence, and the controversy
surrounding Williams has never died down or gone away. If he
does ever manage to win a new trial, I am confident the result
will be the same.
Despite what his supporters maintain, I believe the forensic
and behavioral evidence points conclusively to Wayne Williams
as the killer of eleven young men in Atlanta. Despite what his
detractors and accusers maintain, I believe there is no strong
evidence linking him to all or even most of the deaths and
disappearances of children in that city between 1979 and 1981.
Despite what some people would like to believe, young black and
white children continue to die mysteriously in Atlanta and other
cities. We have an idea who did some of the others. It isn’t a
single offender and the truth isn’t pleasant. So far, though, there’s
been neither the evidence nor the public will to seek indictments.
I got a number of complimentary letters and citations as a
result of my work on the Wayne Williams case, including ones
from the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office saying I had
come up with the effective cross-examination strategy, and one
from John Glover, SAC of the Atlanta Field Office, summarizing
the entire ATKID investigation. One of the most moving and
appreciated came from Al Binder, the lead defense attorney, who
wrote to say how impressed he was by the job we had done on
the case.
ese came in just about the time the letter of censure did.
Jim McKenzie, very upset about this turn of events, had put me
in for an incentive award, not only for the Williams case, but for
five other cases I’d contributed to.
It came through in May. So now I had a letter of
commendation from the director to go with my letter of censure
on the same case. It said, in part, that “through your talent,
dedication to duty, and professionalism, you have indeed
enhanced the Bureau’s fine reputation throughout the Nation,
and you may be certain that your valuable services are truly
appreciated.” A “substantial” cash award of $250 accompanied
the commendation, which I figured worked out to about a nickel
an hour. I promptly donated the money to the Navy Relief Fund
for the benefit of the families of men and women who had died
in service to their country.
If we were faced with a case like the Atlanta child murders
today, I’d like to think we could get to the killer significantly
sooner, before the trail of death and suffering was so appallingly
long. We would all be much more efficient about coordinating
our efforts. Our proactive techniques are more sophisticated and
based on far more real-world experience. We would know how to
stage the interrogation for maximum effect. We would plan
better for the search warrant and get it before critical evidence
could be destroyed.
But whatever mistakes we made, the ATKID case was a
decisive turning point for our unit. We put ourselves on the map,
proved the value of what we could do, and in the process
achieved instant credibility throughout the law enforcement
community worldwide and helped put another killer behind
bars.
High risk, high gain.
12
One of Our Own
Judson Ray is one of the living legends at Quantico. He very
nearly wasn’t. In February of 1982, while he was working
ATKID as a special agent in the Atlanta Field Office, his wife
tried to have him killed.
We first became aware of each other, though we didn’t meet,
during the “Forces of Evil” case in early 1978. A serial killer
dubbed the “Stocking Strangler” had assaulted six elderly women
in Columbus, Georgia, after breaking into their homes,
strangling each of them with their own nylon stockings. All of
the victims were white, and forensic evidence the medical
examiner found on some of the bodies suggested the strangler
was black.
en the chief of police received an alarming letter, written on
U.S. Army stationery, claiming to be from a group of seven
people calling itself the Forces of Evil. e letter made mention
of the belief that the Stocking Strangler was black and threatened
to kill a black woman in retaliation if he was not caught by June
1, or “1 June,” as the writer or writers stated it. ey claimed
already to have abducted a woman named Gail Jackson. If the
“S-Strangler” was not caught by “1 Sept,” “the victims will
double.” e letter suggested that the military stationery had
been stolen and that the group originated in Chicago.
is development represented everyone’s worst nightmare. A
brutal killer stalking Columbus was horrible enough. An
organized and murderous vigilante reaction to it could tear the
community apart.
Other letters followed, upping the ante with a further demand
for a $10,000 ransom, as the police searched frantically but
without success for any of these seven white men. Gail Jackson
was a prostitute, well known around the bars that serviced Fort
Benning. And she was indeed missing.
Jud Ray was a shift commander in the Columbus Police
Department. As an Army Vietnam veteran and a black police
officer who had worked his way up through the ranks, he was
acutely aware that the community would not heal until these
twin threats of the Stocking Strangler and the Forces of Evil
organization were neutralized. With no progress in the
investigation despite all the time and effort that had gone into it,
his cop instincts told him they had to be looking for the wrong
people in the wrong way. He tried to keep up on law
enforcement developments around the country and had heard
about the profiling program in Quantico. He suggested that the
department contact the Behavioral Science Unit and see what we
made of the case.
On March 31, we were asked through the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation to analyze the case. Despite what the original letter
had stated, we were all pretty sure the connection to the Army
and Fort Benning was not a casual one. Bob Ressler, who had
been a military policeman before he joined the Bureau, took the
lead.
Within three days we had returned our report. We felt there
was no evidence this self-styled Forces of Evil was composed of
seven white men. In fact, we didn’t believe it was composed of
any white men. It would be a lone black male, trying to divert
attention away from himself and the fact that he had already
murdered Gail Jackson. From his military usage of dates (e.g., “1
June”) and his reference to meters rather than feet or yards, it was
clear he was in the military. e letters were almost illiterate,
ruling out an officer, who would have had a better education.
From his own experience, Bob felt he would likely be either an
artilleryman or a military policeman, twenty-five to thirty years
of age. He would already have killed two other women, probably
also prostitutes—that’s what his reference to “the victims will
double” was all about—and we thought there was some chance
he might be the Stocking Strangler as well.
When our profile was circulated around Fort Benning and the
bars and nightclubs the victim was known to frequent, the Army
and Columbus police quickly came up with the name of William
H. Hance, a black, twenty-six-year-old specialist four assigned to
an artillery unit at the fort. He confessed to the murders of Gail
Jackson, Irene irkield, and another woman, an Army private
named Karen Hickman, at Fort Benning the previous fall. He
admitted that he had made up the Forces of Evil to throw police
off his track.
e actual Stocking Strangler was identified from a
photograph by a witness at one of the scenes as Carlton Gary, a
twenty-seven-year-old black man who was born and raised in
Columbus. He was captured after a series of restaurant holdups,
but escaped, and was not recaptured until May 1984. Both
Hance and Gary were convicted and sentenced to die for their
crimes.
After the community settled back to normal, Jud Ray took a
leave of absence to run a program at the University of Georgia
that recruited minorities and women into law enforcement
careers. Once this project was over, he planned to go back to
police work. But with his military and investigative background,
not to mention the fact that he was black and at this time the
Bureau desperately needed to establish itself as an equalopportunity employer, he accepted an offer from the FBI. I first
met him casually when he was at Quantico for new-agent
training. He was then assigned to the Atlanta Field Office, where
his experience and knowledge of the local area and people was
considered a tremendous asset.
We next met late in 1981 when I was down in Atlanta for
ATKID. Like everyone else in the field office, Jud was deeply
involved in the investigation. Each agent was part of a team
working five ATKID cases, and Jud was working an intense
schedule.
He was also under tremendous pressure from another source.
His marriage, shaky for some time, was breaking up. His wife
had been drinking heavily, verbally abusing him, acting
erratically. “I didn’t even know this woman anymore,” he said.
Finally, one Sunday evening, he’d given her an ultimatum: either
she had to change her ways and get help or he was going to take
their two daughters—ages eighteen months and eight years—and
leave.
Much to his surprise, Jud did begin seeing positive signs. She
became more attentive to him and the girls. “I saw an abrupt
change in her personality. She quit boozing,” he recalled. “She
started doting over me. For the first time in thirteen years of
marriage, she got up in the morning to make me breakfast.
Suddenly, she’d become all the things I wanted her to be.”
But then he added, “I should have known this was too good
to be true. And that’s something I would lecture to police
afterward. If your spouse suddenly shows you a radical change of
behavior—negatively or positively—you ought to be suspicious
right away.
What was happening was that Jud’s wife had already decided
to have him killed and was buying time until she could make the
arrangements. If she pulled it off successfully, she would be able
to avoid the trauma and humiliation of an ugly divorce, keep the
two kids herself. and collect on a quarter-million-dollar life
insurance policy. Far better to be the grieving and well-off widow
of a murdered law officer than a divorced woman alone in the
world.
Unbeknownst to Jud, two men had been watching his moves
and habits for several days. ey waited outside his apartment
building in the morning and followed him on I-20 into Atlanta
every day. ey were looking for the opportunity to get him
defenseless, so the hit could be accomplished efficiently and a
getaway made without witnesses.
But they quickly realized they had a problem. Jud had been a
law officer long enough that the first rule a cop learns was
instinctive to him: keep your gun hand free. No matter where the
two would-be shooters tracked him, he always seemed to have his
right hand ready to go for his gun.
ey went back to Mrs. Ray and told her the problem. ey
wanted to take him out in the parking lot outside the apartment,
but Jud would be able to get to at least one of them before they
could finish him off. She had to do something about that free
right hand.
Not letting a detail like this stand in her way, she got a travel
coffee cup and suggested Jud take it to work with him every
morning. “For thirteen years, she never made me or the girls
breakfast, and now she was trying to get me to take that damn
coffee cup with me.”
But he resisted. After all these years, he just couldn’t get used
to the idea of driving with his left hand on the wheel and his
right hand occupied with a coffee cup. is was in the days
before cup holders were commonplace in cars. Had they been,
this story might have had a completely different outcome.
e gunmen came back to Mrs. Ray. “We can’t take him in
the parking lot,” one of them reported. “We’ve got to take him
inside.”
So the hit was scheduled for early February. Mrs. Ray had
taken the two girls out for the evening and Jud was home alone.
e shooters come to the building, down the hall, and up to the
apartment door, where they ring the bell. e only problem is,
they have the wrong apartment number. When a white man
comes to the door, the two guys ask where the black man is who
lives there. Innocently, he tells them they have the wrong
apartment. Mr. Ray lives over there.
But now the shooters have been seen by this neighbor. If
there’s a hit tonight, there’s no way he’s not going to remember
two black men asking where Jud Ray lives when the police
question him. So they leave.
Later, Mrs. Ray comes back home assuming the job’s been
done. Hesitantly, she looks around, then crawls into the
bedroom, mentally preparing for the 911 call she’s going to
make, saying something terrible has happened to her husband.
She gets to the bedroom and sees Jud lying there on the bed.
She’s still creeping around. He turns over and says, “What the
hell are you doing?” whereupon she freaks out and runs to the
bathroom.
But in the following days her good behavior continues and
Jud thinks she’s really turned around. As naive as he thinks this
was in retrospect, after many rocky years in a relationship, there
is such an overwhelming desire to believe things truly have
gotten better.
It’s two weeks later—February 21, 1981. Jud is now working
the murder of Patrick Baltazar. It’s potentially a big break in the
ATKID investigation because hair and fiber found on the twelveyear-old’s body appear to match specimens found on previous
victims of the child killer.
at night, Jud’s wife makes him an Italian dinner. What he
doesn’t know is that she’s heavily laced the spaghetti sauce with
phenobarbital. As planned, she takes the two girls with her and
goes to visit her aunt.
Later on, Jud’s home alone in the bedroom. He thinks he
hears something coming from the front of the apartment. e
light in the hallway changes, goes dim. Someone’s unscrewed the
lightbulb in his older daughter’s bedroom. en he hears muffled
voices down the hall. What’s happened is that the first shooter’s
lost his nerve. e two of them are discussing what to do now.
He doesn’t know how they’ve gotten in, but it doesn’t matter at
the moment. ey’re here.
“Who is it?” Jud calls out.
Suddenly, a shot rips out, but it misses him. Jud dives for the
floor, but a second bullet hits him in the left arm. It’s still dark.
He’s trying to hide behind the king-size bed.
“Who is this?” he calls out. “What do you want?”
A third shot hits the bed, close to him. In his mind, he’s going
through this intuitive survival drill, trying to figure out what
kind of gun it is. If it’s a Smith & Wesson, they’ve got three shots
left. If it’s a Colt, they’ve only got two.
“Hey, man!” he yells. “What’s wrong? Why’re you trying to
kill me? Take what you want and get out. I haven’t seen you. Just
don’t kill me.”
ere’s no reply. But now Jud can see him, silhouetted against
the moonlight.
You’re going to die tonight, Jud acknowledges to himself. No
way you’re going to get out of this. But you know what it’s like.
You don’t want detectives walking in here tomorrow and saying,
“is poor bastard, never put up a fight. He just let them come
in and execute him.” Jud resolves that when the detectives see the
scene, they’re going to know he fucking fought this guy.
e first thing he’s got to do is get to his gun, which is on the
floor on the other side of the bed. But a king-size bed represents
a lot of real estate to cover when there’s someone trying to kill
you.
en he hears, “Don’t move, you motherfucker!”
In the darkness, he climbs back up and begins inching toward
the edge of the bed and his gun.
He gets closer, agonizingly slowly, but he needs more leverage
to make the final move effectively.
When he’s got all four fingers gripping the edge, he whirls off
onto the floor, but lands with his right hand under his chest. And
since he’s been shot in his left arm, he doesn’t have enough power
in his left hand to reach for the gun.
Just then, the shooter jumps on the bed. He shoots Jud at
point-blank range.
He feels as if he’s just been kicked by a mule. Something
inside him seems to collapse on itself. He doesn’t know the
technical details at the time, but the bullet has gone through his
back, knocked out his right lung, penetrated the third intercostal
space between his ribs, and ripped out the front of his chest into
his right hand, which he’s still lying on.
e shooter jumps down off the bed, stands over him, feels
his pulse. “ere, you motherfucker!” he declares, and walks out.
Jud’s in shock. He’s lying on the floor hyperventilating. He
doesn’t know where he is or what’s happening to him.
en he realizes, he must be back in combat in Vietnam. He
can smell the smoke, see the muzzle blasts. But he can’t breathe.
He thinks, “Maybe I’m not really in Nam. Maybe I’m just
dreaming I am. But if I’m dreaming, why is it so hard to
breathe?”
He struggles to get up. He staggers over to the television and
turns it on. Maybe that’ll tell him if he’s dreaming. Johnny
Carson and the Tonight show come on. He reaches out and
touches the screen, trying to tell if it’s real, leaving a streak of wet
blood across the glass.
He needs to get some water. He makes his way to the
bathroom, turns on the tap, and tries to cup the water in his
hand. at’s when he sees the bullet embedded in his right hand
and the blood streaming from his chest. Now he knows what’s
happened to him. He goes back out into the bedroom, lies down
at the foot of the bed, and waits to die.
But he’s been a cop too long. He can’t let himself go this
quietly, When the detectives come the next day, they’ve got to see
that he struggled. He gets up again, makes his way to the phone,
and dials O. When the operator comes on, he gasps for air, tells
her that he’s an FBI agent and that he’s been shot. Immediately,
she puts him through to the DeKalb County Police Department.
A young female officer comes on the line. Jud tells her that
he’s FBI and he’s been shot. But he can barely get the words out.
He’s been drugged, he’s lost a lot of blood, his speech is slurred.
“What do you mean, you’re FBI?” she challenges. Jud hears
her yell to her sergeant that there’s some drunk on the line
claiming he’s with the FBI. What does the sergeant want her to
do? e sergeant tells her she can hang up.
en the operator breaks in, telling them he’s for real and that
they’ve got to send emergency help immediately. She won’t let
them off until they agree.
“at operator saved my life,” Jud told me later.
He passed out when she broke in and didn’t regain
consciousness until the emergency medical team was putting the
oxygen mask over his face. “Don’t prepare him for shock,” he
hears the team leader say. “He’s not going to make it.”
But they take him to DeKalb General Hospital, where there’s
a thoracic surgeon on duty. And as he’s lying there on the gurney
in the emergency room, as the doctors frantically try to save his
life, he knows.
With the clarity that comes from a close encounter with
death, he’s saying to himself, “is isn’t a reprisal. I’ve put a lot of
people in jail, but they couldn’t get that close. e only person
who could get that close to me is someone that I trusted
implicitly.”
When he comes out of surgery and is taken to the intensive
care unit, the Atlanta SAC, John Glover, is there. Glover has
been bearing the weight of ATKID for months, and now this.
Like the dead children and like Jud, Glover is also black, one of
the highest-ranking blacks in the Bureau. He feels enormously
for Jud.
“Find my wife,” Jud whispers to him. “Make her tell you what
happened.”
Glover thinks Jud’s still delirious, but the doctor says no—he’s
conscious and alert.
Jud spends twenty-one days in the hospital, his hospital room
under armed guard since no one knows who these shooters are or
whether they’re coming back to finish him off. Meanwhile, his
case is going nowhere. His wife expresses shock and dismay over
what happened and thanks God he wasn’t killed. If only she’d
been there that night.
In the office, a team of agents are tracking down leads. Jud’s
been a cop for a long time. He could have a lot of enemies. Once
it’s clear he’s going to recover, the question is phrased in a lighter
vein, in terms of the popular TV series Dallas: “Who shot J.R.?”
It’s a couple of months before he can get his routine back to
normal. He finally tackles the stack of bills that have been piling
up since the attack. He moans as he faces a Southern Bell
telephone bill for more than $300. But as he starts going through
it, he begins putting the case together in his mind.
e next day, he comes into the office and says he thinks this
phone bill is the key. As the victim, he’s not supposed to be
working his own case, but his colleagues listen.
Listed on the bill are a bunch of calls back to Columbus.
From the phone company, they get the name and address that go
with the number. Jud doesn’t even know this guy. So he and
several other agents get in the car and drive the hundred miles
down to Columbus. eir destination is the home of a preacher,
who, Jud decides, is actually more of a snake oil salesman.
e FBI agents lean on him, but he denies having anything to
do with the attempted murder. e agents aren’t going to let him
off easily. is is one of our own, they tell him, and we’re going
to get the person or persons who did this.
en the story begins to emerge. is preacher is known
around Columbus as a man who can “get things done.” Mrs. Ray
had approached him to do the job back in October, but he says
he told her he wouldn’t do it.
She answers that she’ll find someone who will and asks to use
the phone, saying she’ll pay him back for the long-distance calls.
e preacher tells the agents she called back to an old neighbor
in Atlanta who’d been in the Army in Vietnam the same time as
Jud and knew his way around a gun. She tells him, “We’ve got to
get this thing done!”
And to top it all off, the preacher claims, “Mrs. Ray stiffed me
for the phone calls.”
e agents get in the car and drive back to Atlanta, where
they confront the former neighbor. Under grilling, he admits
Mrs. Ray asked him about a contract killing, but he swears he
had no idea it was Jud she was trying to get.
Anyway, he says he told her he didn’t know anybody who did
that sort of thing and put her in touch with his brother-in-law,
who might. e brother-in-law, in turn, introduces her to
another guy, who agrees to take on the job and hires two other
men to be the shooters.
Mrs. Ray, the former neighbor’s brother-in-law, the man who
took the contract, and the two shooters are all indicted. e
former neighbor is named an unindicted coconspirator. e five
charged are found guilty of attempted murder, conspiracy, and
burglary. ey each get a ten-year sentence, the most the judge
can give them.
I would see Jud from time to time in relation to ATKID.
Before long, he began seeking me out. Since I wasn’t one of his
colleagues in the office but knew what the stress of the job was all
about and could understand what he’d been through and
continued to go through, I guess he felt he could talk to me. In
addition to all the other feelings that go with such a thing, he
told me he found the public airing of his domestic situation very
painful and embarrassing.
With all Jud suffered, the Bureau wanted to do whatever was
best for him and thought that transferring him to another field
office far from Atlanta would help him recover. But after talking
with Jud and sharing his feelings, I didn’t think so. I thought he
should stay where he was for a while.
I went in and spoke to John Glover, the SAC in Atlanta. I
said, “If you transfer him, you’re eliminating the support system
he has right here in this office. He needs to stay here. Let him
spend a year getting his children settled again and close to the
aunt who helped raise him.” I suggested that if he was going to
go anywhere, it should be to the Columbus Resident Agency,
since he’d been a cop there and still knew most of the force.
ey did keep him in the Atlanta-Columbus area, where he
began to get his life back in order. en he moved to the New
York Field Office, where his main job was foreign
counterintelligence. He also became one of the office’s profile
coordinators—the liaison between the local police and my unit at
Quantico.
When slots became available in the unit, we brought Jud on,
along with Roseanne Russo, also from New York, and Jim
Wright, from the Washington Field Office, who had spent more
than a year working the John Hinckley case and trial. Roseanne
eventually left the unit for the Washington Field Office and
foreign counterintelligence. Jud and Jim both became
distinguished and internationally known members of the team
and close friends of mine. When I became unit chief, Jim Wright
took over from me as manager of the profiling program.
Jud claimed to have been shocked that we picked him. But
he’d been an outstanding coordinator in New York, and because
of his strong law enforcement background, he worked out right
from the beginning. He was a quick learner and extremely
analytical. As a police officer, he’d seen these cases from the
“trenches” and brought that perspective to them.
When it would come up in a teaching situation, Jud wouldn’t
be afraid to mention the attempt on his life and its repercussions.
He even had a tape recording of his emergency telephone call,
which he would sometimes play for a class. But he couldn’t stand
to be in the room. He would step outside until it was over.
I told him, “Jud, this is a tremendous thing.” I explained that
so many of the elements at the scene—the footprints, the blood
on the television—would have been misleading or nonsensical.
Now we were beginning to understand how seemingly irrational
elements can have a rational explanation. “If you work this case
up,” I told him, “it could be an extremely valuable teaching tool.”
He did that, and it became one of the most interesting and
informative cases we taught. And it became a catharsis for him:
“I found it quite a personal revelation. In the process of
preparing to teach, I’d go down an alleyway I’d never ventured
into before. Every time you talk about it to people you can trust,
you explore another alley. Contract spouse killings and attempts
happen more frequently in this country than we’d like to believe.
And the family is often so embarrassed that no one will talk
about it.” Watching Jud teach this case has been among my most
moving experiences as an Academy instructor. And I know I’m
not alone. Eventually, he got to the point where he would stay
and listen when the emergency tape was played.
By the time Jud became part of my unit, I had already done a
fair amount of research on postoffense behavior. It had become
clear to me that no matter how hard he tries, much of what the
offender does after the crime is beyond his conscious control. As
a result of his own case, Jud became very interested in the issue of
preoffense behavior. For a while, we had understood the
importance of precipitating stressors as distinct events leading to
the commission of a crime. But Jud expanded the unit’s horizons
considerably and demonstrated how important it is to focus on
the behavior and interpersonal actions before a crime takes place.
A radical or even subtle but significant change in a partner’s
behavior can mean that he or she has already begun to plan for a
change in the status quo. If the husband or wife becomes
unexpectedly calm or much more friendly and accepting than
before, it can mean he or she has already come to regard that
change as inevitable or imminent.
Contract spouse killings are difficult to investigate. e
survivor has laid the emotional groundwork well. e only way
to crack these cases is to get someone to talk, and you have to
understand the dynamics of the situation and what really
happened to be authoritative in this. As much as the
rearrangement of a crime scene can lead the police in the wrong
direction, a spouse’s preoffense behavior is a form of staging.
More than anything else, Jud’s case is an object lesson for us
on how you can misinterpret behavior at a crime scene. If Jud
had died, we would have come to some wrong conclusions.
One of the first things a rookie cop is taught is not to
contaminate a crime scene. But by his own barely conscious
actions, veteran cop and special agent that he was, Jud
inadvertently contaminated his own crime scene. We would have
interpreted all of the footprints and evidence of his movement to
have been a burglary that went bad—that the intruders had
walked him around the room, forcing him to tell them where
particular items were hidden. e blood on the TV screen would
have suggested that Jud had been lying in bed watching television
when he’d been surprised and immediately shot.
e most important consideration, as Jud told me, was that
“if I had died, I’m absolutely convinced she would have gotten
away with it. It was well planned and her actions had prepped
everyone in the neighborhood. She would have been completely
believable as the grieving spouse.
As I said, Jud and I became close friends; he’s probably the
closest thing to a brother I have ever had. I used to joke that he
would make sure to play the tape for me right around
performance-rating time, to assure the full measure of my
sympathy. Fortunately, though, that was never necessary. Jud
Ray’s record speaks for itself. He is now chief of the International
Training Unit, where his skill and experience will benefit a new
generation of agents and policemen and policewomen. But
wherever he goes, he will always be one of our own and one of
the best—one of the few law officers around to survive an
attempt on his life through character and sheer force of will, and
then to bring the culprits to justice himself.
13
e Most Dangerous Game
In 1924, the author Richard Connell wrote a short story entitled
“e Most Dangerous Game.” It was about a big-game hunter
named General Zaroff who had tired of pursuing animals and
had begun hunting a much more challenging and intelligent
prey: human beings. It’s still a popular story. My daughter Lauren
read it recently in school.
As far as we know, until about 1980, Connell’s tale remained
in the realm of fiction. But its status changed with a mildmannered baker in Anchorage, Alaska, named Robert Hansen.
We didn’t profile Hansen or devise a strategy to identify and
catch him according to our usual procedure. In September 1983,
by the time my unit was called in, Alaska state troopers had
already identified Hansen as a murder suspect. But they weren’t
sure of the extent of his crimes, or whether such an unlikely
individual, a respectable family man and pillar of the community,
was capable of the terrible things of which he was being accused.
What had happened was this:
e previous June 13, a young woman had run frantically to
an Anchorage police officer. She had a pair of handcuffs dangling
from one wrist and told an extraordinary story. She was a
seventeen-year-old prostitute who’d been approached on the
street by a short, pockmarked man with red hair who had offered
her $200 for oral sex in his car. She said that while she was
performing, he slipped a handcuff on her wrist and pulled out a
gun, then drove her to his house in the fashionable Muldoon area
of the city. No one else was home. He told her that if she
cooperated and did what he asked, he would not hurt her. But
then he forced her to strip naked, raped her, and inflicted severe
pain by biting her nipples and thrusting a hammer into her
vagina. While he still had her handcuffed to a pole in his
basement and immobilized, he slept for several hours. When he
awoke, he told her that he liked her so much that he was going
to fly her in his private airplane out to his cabin in the woods,
where they’d have sex again and then he’d fly her back to
Anchorage, where he would free her.
But she knew the chances of that were pretty remote. He had
raped and assaulted her and hadn’t done anything to hide his
identity. If he got her into that cabin, she would be in real
trouble. At the airport, while her kidnapper was loading supplies
into the plane, she managed to escape. She ran as fast as she
could looking for help. at was when she found the policeman.
From the description she gave, her kidnapper appeared to be
Robert Hansen. He was in his mid-forties, had grown up in
Iowa, and had been in the Anchorage area for seventeen years,
where he ran a successful bakery and was considered a prominent
member of the community. He was married, with a daughter and
a son. e police drove her to Hansen’s house in Muldoon,
which she said was where she’d been tortured. ey took her to
the airport and she identified the Piper Super Cub that belonged
to Robert Hansen.
e police then went to Hansen and confronted him with the
young woman’s charges. He responded with outrage, saying he
had never met her, and asserted that because of his prominence,
she was obviously trying to shake him down for money. e very
idea was ridiculous. “You can’t rape a prostitute, can you?” he
said to police.
And he had an alibi for the night in question. His wife and
two children were in Europe for the summer, and he was home
having dinner with two business associates. He gave their names
and they corroborated his story. Police had no evidence on him
—just the young woman’s word—so he wasn’t arrested or
charged.
But though they lacked proof, both the Anchorage police and
Alaska state troopers office smelled smoke and knew a fire was
out there somewhere. Back in 1980, construction workers had
been excavating on Eklutna Road when they came upon the
partial remains of a woman. Her body had been partly eaten by
bears and bore the signs of having been stabbed to death and
buried in a shallow grave. Known only as “Eklutna Annie,” she
had never been identified and her killer had never been caught.
Later in the year, the body of Joanne Messina was discovered
in a gravel pit near Seward. en, in September 1982, hunters
near the Knik River found the body of twenty-three-year-old
Sherry Morrow in a shallow grave. She was a topless dancer
who’d been missing since the previous November. She’d been
shot three times. Shell casings found at the scene identified the
bullets as coming from a .223 Ruger Mini-14, a high-powered
hunting rifle. Unfortunately, it was a common weapon in Alaska,
so it would have been difficult to track down and interview every
hunter who owned one. But one peculiar aspect to the case was
that no bullet holes were in her clothing, indicating she must
have been naked when shot.
Almost exactly a year later another body was discovered in a
shallow grave along the bank of the Knik. is time it was Paula
Golding, an out-of-work secretary who had rather desperately
taken a job in a topless bar to make ends meet. She had also been
shot with a Ruger Mini-14. She’d gone missing in April, and
since then the seventeen-year-old prostitute had been abducted
and escaped. Now, with Golding to add to the list of unsolved
crimes, the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Alaska state
troopers office decided they’d better follow up on Mr. Hansen.
Even though the police had a suspect before I heard about
him, I wanted to make sure my judgment wouldn’t be clouded
by the investigative work already done. So before I let them give
me the specifics on their man during our first phone conference,
I said, “First tell me about the crimes and let me tell you about
the guy.”
ey described the unsolved murders and the details of the
young woman’s story. I described a scenario and an individual
they said sounded very much like their suspect, down to the
stuttering. en they told me about Hansen, his job and family,
his position in the community, his reputation as an outstanding
game hunter. Did this sound like the kind of guy who could be
capable of these crimes?
He sure did, I told them. e problem was, while they had a
lot of secondhand information, they just didn’t have physical
evidence to charge him. e only way to get him off the street,
which they were extremely anxious to do, was to get a confession.
ey asked me to come on-scene and help them develop their
case.
In a sense, this was the opposite of what we normally do in
that we were working from a known subject, trying to determine
whether his background, personality, and behavior fit a set of
crimes.
I brought along Jim Horn, who had recently joined my unit
from the Boulder, Colorado, Resident Agency. We’d gone
through new-agents training together back in the old days, and
when I finally got authorization for four agents to work with me,
I’d asked Jim to come back to Quantico. Along with Jim Reese,
Jim Horn is now one of the two top stress-management experts
in the Bureau, a critical function in our line of work. But in
1983, this was one of his first cases on the behavioral side.
Getting to Anchorage was one of the more exciting and least
pleasurable business trips I’ve had. It ended up with a red-eye,
white-knuckle flight over water. When we arrived, the police
picked us up and took us to our hotel. On the way, we passed
some of the bars where the victims had worked. It was too cold
most of the time for hookers to work outside, so they made their
business connections in the bars, which were open practically
twenty-four hours a day. ey closed for maybe an hour to clean
up and sweep out the drunks. At the time, largely as a result of
the huge transient population that came in for the construction
of the oil pipeline, Alaska had among the highest rates in the
country of suicide, alcoholism, and venereal disease. It had very
much become the modern version of our Wild West frontier.
I found the entire atmosphere very strange. ere appeared to
be an ongoing conflict between the native people and those who
had come from “the lower forty-eight.” You had all these macho
men walking around with big tattoos and looking as if they’d
come straight out of a Marlboro ad. With the great distances
people had to travel, it seemed as though almost everyone had an
airplane, so Hansen wasn’t unusual in that respect.
What was significant to us about this case was that it was the
first time profiling was used to support a search warrant. We
began analyzing everything we knew about the crimes and about
Robert Hansen.
As far as victimology was concerned, the known victims had
been prostitutes or topless dancers. ey were part of a great crop
of available victims who traveled up and down the West Coast.
Because they were so transient, and because prostitutes are not in
the habit of reporting their whereabouts to the police, it was
difficult to know if anything had happened to any one of them
until a body turned up. is was exactly the same problem the
police and FBI faced with the Green River Killer down in
Washington State. So the choice of victims was highly significant.
e murderer was targeting only women who would not be
missed.
We didn’t know everything about Hansen’s background, but
what we did know fit into a pattern. He was short and slight,
heavily pockmarked, and spoke with a severe stutter. I surmised
that he had had severe skin problems as a teenager and, between
that and the speech impediment, was probably teased or shunned
by his peers, particularly girls. So his self-esteem would have been
low. at might also have been why he moved to Alaska—the
idea of a new start in a new frontier. And, psychologically
speaking, abusing prostitutes is a pretty standard way of getting
back at women in general.
I also made much of the fact that Hansen was known as a
proficient hunter. He had made a local reputation for himself by
taking down a wild Dall sheep with a crossbow while hunting in
the Kuskokwim Mountains. I don’t mean to imply that most
hunters are inadequate types, but in my experience, if you have
an inadequate type to begin with, one of the ways he might try
to compensate is by hunting or playing around with guns or
knives. e severe stutter reminded me of David Carpenter, San
Francisco’s “Trailside Killer.” As in Carpenter’s case, I was betting
that Hansen’s speech problem disappeared when he felt most
dominant and in control.
Putting this all together, even though this was a scenario we’d
never seen before, I was beginning to get an image of what I
thought was going on. Prostitutes and “exotic dancers” had been
found dead in remote wooded areas of gunshot wounds
suggestive of those made with a hunting rifle. In at least one case,
the shots had been fired at an undressed body. e seventeenyear-old who said she had escaped claimed Robert Hansen
wanted to fly her to his cabin in the woods. Hansen had packed
his wife and children off to Europe for the summer and was
home alone.
It was my belief that, like General Zaroff in “e Most
Dangerous Game,” Robert Hansen had tired of elk and bear and
Dall sheep and turned his attention to a more interesting prey.
Zaroff explained that he used captured sailors who shipwrecked
on the intentionally unmarked rocks in the channel leading to
his island:
“I hunt the scum of the earth—sailors from tramp ships—a
thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of
them.”
Hansen, I was surmising, regarded prostitutes in much the
same way. ey were people he could regard as lower and more
worthless than himself. And he wouldn’t need the gift of gab to
get one to come with him. He would pick her up, make her his
prisoner, fly her out into the wilderness, strip her naked, let her
loose, then hunt her down with a gun or knife.
His MO wouldn’t have started this way. He would have
started simply by killing the early ones, then using the plane to
fly their bodies far away. ese were crimes of anger. He would
have gotten off on having his victims beg for their lives. Being a
hunter, at a certain point it would have occurred to him that he
could combine these various activities by flying them out into the
wilderness alive, then hunting them down for sport and further
sexual gratification. is would have been the ultimate control.
And it would have become addictive. He would want to do it
again and again.
And this led me to the details of the search warrant. What
they wanted from Jim and me was an affidavit they could take to
court explaining what profiling was all about, what we would
expect to find in the search, and our rationale for being able to
say so.
Unlike a common criminal or someone whose gun is an
interchangeable tool, Hansen’s hunting rifle would be important
to him. erefore, I predicted the rifle would be somewhere in
his house, though not in open view. It would be in a crawl space,
behind paneling or a false wall, hidden in the attic; someplace
like that.
I also predicted our guy would be a “saver,” though not
entirely for the normal reasons. A lot of sexual killers take
souvenirs from their victims and give them to the women in their
lives as a sign of dominance and a way of being able to relive the
experience. But Hansen couldn’t very well put a woman’s head on
the wall the way he would a big-game animal’s, so I thought it
likely he would take some other kind of trophy. Since there was
no evidence of human mutilation on the bodies, I expected him
to have taken jewelry, which he would have given to his wife or
daughter, making up a story about where the piece came from.
He didn’t appear to have kept the victims’ underwear or any
other item we could account for, but he might have kept small
photographs or something else from a wallet. And from my
experience with this type of personality, I thought we might find
a journal or list documenting his exploits.
e next order of business was cracking his alibi. It was no big
deal for his two business associates to say they were with him the
night in question if nothing was at stake for them. If we could
create some high stakes, however, that could change things.
Anchorage police got the district attorney to authorize a grand
jury to investigate the abduction and assault of the young
prostitute who had identified Hansen. e businessmen were
then approached by the police and asked to give their stories
again. Only this time they were informed that if they were found
to be lying to the grand jury, they’d each be facing hard time.
As we’d anticipated, that was enough to break things open.
Both men admitted they had not been with Hansen that night,
that he’d asked them to help him out of what he characterized as
an awkward situation.
So Hansen was arrested on charges of kidnapping and rape. A
search warrant of his home was immediately executed. ere
police found the Ruger Mini-14 rifle. Ballistics tests matched it
to the shell casings found near the bodies. As we’d figured,
Hansen had a well-outfitted trophy room where he watched
television, full of animal heads, walrus tusks, horns and antlers,
mounted birds, and skins on the floor. Under the floorboards in
the attic they found more weapons, and various cheap items of
jewelry belonging to the victims. One of these was a Timex
watch. He had given other items to his wife and daughter. ey
also found a driver’s license and other ID cards from some of the
dead women. ey didn’t come across a journal, but they did
find the equivalent: an aviation map marked with where he had
left various bodies.
All of this evidence, of course, was enough to make a case to
nail him. But without the warrant, we wouldn’t have had it. And
the only way we could get a warrant in this instance was to
demonstrate to a judge’s satisfaction that there was sufficient
behavioral evidence to justify a search. We have successfully aided
in search-warrant affidavits leading to arrests many times since
then, perhaps most notably in the Delaware case of Steven
Pennell, the “I-40 Killer,” who was executed in 1992 for
torturing and killing women he picked up in his specially
outfitted van.
By the time Anchorage police and Alaska state troopers
actually interrogated Robert Hansen in February 1984, I was
home recovering from my collapse in Seattle. Roy Hazelwood,
who was heroically covering for me while still handling all his
own work, coached the police on interview techniques.
As he had when police first confronted him with the
abduction charge, Hansen denied everything. He pointed to his
happy home life and his success in business. At first he claimed
that the reason shells from his rifle had been found at various
sites was that he had been there and practiced his shooting.
Apparently, the presence of dead bodies at each of the locations
was merely coincidental. But eventually, faced with a mountain
of evidence and the prospect of an angry prosecutor seeking the
death penalty if he didn’t come clean, he admitted to the
murders.
In trying to rationalize and justify himself, he claimed that he
only wanted oral sex from the prostitutes he picked up—
something he didn’t feel he should ask from his proper,
respectable wife. If the hooker satisfied him, he said, that would
be that. e ones who didn’t comply—who tried to control the
situation—those were the ones he punished.
In this way, Hansen’s behavior mirrored what we learned in
our prison interview with Monte Rissell. Both Hansen and
Rissell were inadequate types with bad backgrounds. e women
who received the worst of Rissell’s wrath were the ones who tried
to feign friendship or enjoyment to placate him. What they
didn’t realize was that for this type of individual, the power and
domination of the situation is everything.
Hansen also asserted that thirty to forty prostitutes had gone
with him willingly in his plane and that he had brought them
back alive. I found this proposition hard to believe. e class of
prostitutes Hansen picked up are in business to turn a quick trick
and move on to the next customer. If they’ve been in the business
for any time, they’re generally pretty good assessors of people.
ey’re not willingly going to take a plane ride into the country
with some john they’ve just met. If they made a mistake with
him, it would be in letting him convince them to come with him
to his house. Once he got them inside, it was too late.
Like his fictional counterpart, General Zaroff, Hansen stated
that he hunted and killed only a certain class of people. He
would never consider hurting a “decent” woman, but felt that
prostitutes and topless or nude dancers were fair game. “I’m not
saying I hate all women, I don’t . . . but I guess prostitutes are
women I’m putting down as lower than myself . . . . It’s like it
was a game, they had to pitch the ball before I could bat.”
Once he started his hunting, the killing became anticlimactic.
“e excitement,” Hansen told interrogators, “was in the
stalking.”
He confirmed our suspicions about his background. He had
grown up in Pocahontas, Iowa, where his father was a baker.
Robert was a shoplifter as a child, and long after he reached
adulthood and could afford to buy what he wanted, he still stole
for the thrill of it. His trouble with girls started in high school,
he said. He resented the fact that his stuttering and bad acne kept
people away from him. “Because I looked and talked like a freak,
every time I looked at a girl she would turn away.” He had an
uneventful stint in the Army, then married when he was twentytwo. ere followed a string of arson and burglary convictions,
separation and divorce from his wife, and remarriage. He moved
to Alaska upon his second wife’s graduation from college. ere
he could make a new start. But his troubles with the law
continued for several more years, including repeated assault
charges against women who apparently rejected his advances.
Interestingly, like so many of the others, he drove a VW Beetle at
the time.
On February 27, 1984, Hansen pled guilty to four counts of
murder, one of rape, one of kidnapping, and assorted theft and
weapons charges. He was sentenced to 499 years in prison.
One of the questions we’d had to answer in the Hansen case
before police knew how to proceed was whether all of the noted
prostitute and topless-dancer deaths in Anchorage had been or
could have been committed by the same individual. is is often
a critical issue in criminal investigative analysis. Just about the
time the body of Robert Hansen’s first victim was discovered in
Alaska, I’d been called by the Buffalo, New York, Police
Department to evaluate a string of vicious, apparently racially
hate-based murders.
On September 22, 1980, a fourteen-year-old boy named
Glenn Dunn was shot and killed in the parking lot of a
supermarket. Witnesses described the gunman as a young white
male. e next day Harold Green, thirty-two, was shot at a fastfood restaurant in suburban Cheektowaga. at same night,
thirty-year-old Emmanuel omas was killed in front of his own
house, in the same neighborhood as the previous day’s murder.
And the next day another man, Joseph McCoy, was killed in
Niagara Falls.
As far as anyone could tell, only two factors linked these
senseless murders. All the victims were black men. And all had
been killed by .22-caliber bullets, prompting the press to bestow
an instant title: the “.22-Caliber Killer.”
Racial tension ran high in Buffalo. Many in the black
community felt helpless and accused the police of doing nothing
to protect them. In some ways it seemed to mirror the horror
taking place in Atlanta. And as so often happens in these
situations, things didn’t immediately get better. ey got worse.
On October 8, a seventy-one-year-old black taxi driver named
Parler Edwards was found in the trunk of his cab in suburban
Amherst with his heart cut out. e next day, another black taxi
driver, forty-year-old Ernest Jones, was found on the bank of the
Niagara River with his heart torn out of his chest. His cab,
covered with blood, was found a couple of miles away within the
Buffalo city limits. e day after that, a Friday, a white man
roughly matching the description of the .22-Caliber Killer
entered the hospital room of thirty-seven-year-old Collin Cole,
announced, “I hate niggers,” and proceeded to strangle the
patient. Only a nurse’s arrival caused the intruder to flee and
saved Cole from death.
e community was in an uproar. Public officials were
concerned a wide-scale reaction from black activist groups might
be imminent. At the request of Buffalo SAC Richard Bretzing, I
came up that weekend. Bretzing is a very proper, solid guy, a real
family man and a key member of the FBI’s so-called Mormon
Mafia. I’ll never forget, he had a sign in his office saying
something to the effect of, “If a man fails at home, he fails in his
life.”
As I always try to do, I looked first at the victimology. As the
police had suggested, there really weren’t any significant common
denominators between the six victims except their race and, I
felt, being unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time. Quite clearly, the .22-caliber shootings were all done
by the same individual. ese were mission-oriented, assassinstyle killings. e only evident psychopathology in these crimes
was a pathological hatred of blacks. Everything else about them
was detached and removed.
I could see this individual joining hate groups, or even groups
with positive goals or values such as a church and convincing
himself he was contributing to them. For this reason, I could see
him joining the military, but he would have been discharged
early in his career for psychological reasons or failure to adjust to
military life. is would be a rational and organized individual,
and his prejudiced delusional system would be orderly and
“logical” within itself.
e other two crimes, the horrifying attacks on the taxi
drivers, also were racially based, but in these cases, I did not feel
we were dealing with the same offender. ese crimes were the
work of a disorganized, pathologically disoriented person,
possibly hallucinatory and in all probability a diagnosed paranoid
schizophrenic. To me, the crime scenes reflected rage,
overcontrol, and overkill. For the four shootings and two
eviscerations to have been perpetrated by the same individual
would have meant a severe personality disintegration between the
murders of Joseph McCoy and that of Parler Edwards less than
two weeks later. is didn’t square with the incident in the
hospital—if that person was, in fact, the .22-Caliber Killer—plus
my instinct and experience told me that the heart remover’s sick
fantasies had been building for a long time, several years at least.
Robbery wasn’t a motive in either set of killings, but while the
first four represented a quick hit and get the hell out, the crime
scenes of the last two clearly showed that the offender took a lot
of time at the site. If these six crimes were related, it was more
likely to me that the psycho who cut out the hearts might have
been triggered by the racist who had already gone about
assassinating blacks in the community.
en, on December 22, in midtown Manhattan, four blacks
and one Hispanic were knifed to death over a thirteen-hour
period by the “Midtown Slasher.” Two other black victims
narrowly escaped being killed. On December 29 and 30, the
slasher apparently struck again upstate, stabbing and killing
thirty-one-year-old Roger Adams in Buffalo and twenty-six-yearold Wendell Barnes in Rochester. In the next three days, three
other black men in Buffalo survived similar attacks.
Now I couldn’t assure police that the .22-Caliber Killer was
also the Midtown Slasher or the man who had committed this
last set of crimes. But what I could say with conviction was that
it was the same type of individual. ey all had the racist element,
and all were committed in a blitz-assassination style.
e .22-Caliber case broke in two steps over the next several
months. In January, Army private Joseph Christopher, age
twenty-five, was arrested at Fort Benning, Georgia (where three
years before William Hance had tried to play the racist card in
the “Forces of Evil” murders), charged with slashing a black
fellow soldier. A search of his old house near Buffalo turned up a
large store of .22-caliber ammunition and a sawed-off rifle.
Christopher had just enlisted the previous November and was on
leave from Fort Benning during the times of the Buffalo and
Manhattan murders.
While in the Confinement Center at Fort Benning, he told
Capt. Aldrich Johnson, the officer in charge, that he did “that
thing in Buffalo.” He was charged with the Buffalo shootings and
some of the stabbings. He was convicted, and after some backand-forth wrangling about his mental competence, was
sentenced to sixty years to life. Capt. Matthew Levine, the
psychiatrist who examined Christopher at Martin Army
Hospital, said he was amazed by how closely Christopher fit the
.22-Caliber Killer profile. As the profile had predicted, the
subject did not adjust well to military life.
Christopher neither admitted nor denied the murders of the
two taxi drivers. He wasn’t charged with them and they don’t fit
into the pattern of the others, from either a modus operandi or
signature perspective. Both of these are extremely important
concepts in criminal investigative analysis, and I have spent many
hours on the witness stands of courtrooms throughout the
country trying to get judges and juries to understand the
distinction between them.
Modus operandi—MO—is learned behavior. It’s what the
perpetrator does to commit the crime. It is dynamic—that is, it
can change. Signature, a term I coined to distinguish it from
MO, is what the perpetrator has to do to fulfill himself. It is static;
it does not change.
For example, you wouldn’t expect a juvenile to keep
committing crimes the same way as he grows up unless he gets it
perfect the first time. But if he gets away with one, he’ll learn
from it and get better and better at it. at’s why we say that
MO is dynamic. On the other hand, if this guy is committing
crimes so that, say, he can dominate or inflict pain on or provoke
begging and pleading from a victim, that’s a signature. It’s
something that expresses the killer’s personality. It’s something he
needs to do.
In many states, the only way prosecutors can link crimes is by
MO, which I believe we’ve shown is an archaic method. In the
Christopher case, a defense attorney could easily make the
argument that the Buffalo .22-caliber shootings and the
Manhattan midtown slashings showed a markedly different
modus operandi. And he’d be right. But the signature is similar
—a propensity to randomly assassinate black men fueled by
racial hatred.
e shootings and the eviscerations, on the other hand, show
me a markedly different signature. e individual who cut out
the hearts, while still possessing a related underlying motivation,
has a ritualized, obsessive-compulsive signature. Each type needs
something out of the crime, but each one needs something
different.
e differences between MO and signature can be subtle.
Take the case of a bank robber in Texas who made all of his
captives undress, posed them in sexual positions, and took
photographs of them. at’s his signature. It was not necessary or
helpful to the commission of a bank robbery. In fact, it kept him
there longer and therefore placed him in greater jeopardy of
being caught. Yet it was something he clearly felt a need to do.
en there was a bank robber in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I
flew out to provide on-site consultation in the case. is guy also
made everyone in the bank undress, but he didn’t take pictures.
He did it so the witnesses would be so preoccupied and
embarrassed that they wouldn’t be looking at him and so couldn’t
make a positive ID later on. is was a means toward successfully
robbing the bank. is was MO.
Signature analysis played a significant role in the 1989 trial of
Steven Pennell in Delaware, in whose case we’d prepared the
affidavit leading to the search warrant. Steve Mardigian from my
unit worked closely with the combined task force of New Castle
County and Delaware state police, producing a profile that
allowed police to narrow their focus and come up with a
proactive strategy to nail the killer.
Prostitutes had been found strangled with their skulls
fractured along Interstates 40 and 13. e bodies had clearly
been sexually abused and tortured. Steve’s profile was very
accurate. He said the offender would be a white male in his late
twenties to early thirties, employed in one of the construction
trades. He would drive a van with high mileage, cruise excessively
looking for victims, exhibit a macho image, have an ongoing
relationship with a wife or girlfriend, but enjoy dominating
women. He would bring his weapons of choice with him and
destroy evidence afterward. He would be familiar with the area
and choose his disposal sites accordingly. He would be
emotionally flat during the crimes and would kill again and again
until caught.
Steven B. Pennell was a thirty-one-year-old white male who
worked as an electrician, drove a van with high mileage, cruised
excessively looking for victims, exhibited a macho image, was
married but enjoyed dominating women, had a carefully
prepared “rape kit” in his van, attempted to destroy evidence
when he knew the police were onto him, was familiar with the
area, and chose his disposal sites accordingly. He was emotionally
flat during the crimes and killed repeatedly until caught.
He was located when Mardigian suggested using a decoy
female cop posing as a hooker. For two months Officer Renee C.
Lano walked the highways, always looking for a man in a van to
pull up who matched the profile’s description. ey were
particularly interested in the van’s carpeting. Blue fibers
consistent with automobile carpeting had been found on one of
the victims. If a van did stop, Lano was under strict orders not to
get in—even though she was wired, that could have been a death
sentence—but to find out as much as she could. When a guy
matching the traits finally did stop, she engaged him in
conversation and haggled extensively about the price for her
services through the opened passenger door. As soon as she
noticed the blue carpeting, she began admiring the van, and as
they talked, she began casually scraping up carpet fibers with her
fingernails. e FBI laboratory would confirm that they matched
the previous samples.
At Pennell’s trial, I was called in to testify about the signature
aspects of the case. e defense was trying to show that it was
unlikely these crimes were all committed by the same individual
because so many details of the modus operandi varied. I made it
clear that regardless of the MO, the common denominator in
each of the murders was physical, sexual, and emotional torture.
In some cases the murderer had used pliers to squeeze his victims’
breasts and cut their nipples. He had bound others at the wrists
and ankles, cut them on the legs, whipped or beaten their
buttocks, or hit them with a hammer. So, though the methods of
torture varied—the MO, if you will—the signature was the
pleasure he received out of inflicting pain and hearing his
victims’ anguished screams. is wasn’t necessary to accomplish
the murder. It was necessary for him to get what he wanted to
out of the crime.
Even if Steven Pennell were still alive and reading this, he
would not be able to change his behavior in future crimes. He
might be able to devise different or more ingenious methods of
torturing women. But he would not be able to refrain from the
torture itself.
Fortunately for all of us, as I mentioned, the State of
Delaware had the good judgment and decency to execute Pennell
by lethal injection on March 14, 1992.
One of our landmark cases in the use of signature analysis was
the 1991 trial of George Russell Jr., charged with the
bludgeoning and strangulation murder of three white women in
Seattle—Mary Anne Pohlreich, Andrea Levine, and Carol Marie
Beethe—the year before. Steve Etter from my unit did the
profiling, then I went out to testify. In these cases, the
prosecution knew it could not get a conviction based on a single
murder. Police had the most compelling evidence in the
Pohlreich killing and felt it would shore up the other two cases.
So the key was tying all three together.
Russell wasn’t the type you’d think of for these heinous crimes.
ough having a long record as a petty thief, he was a handsome
black man in his thirties, well spoken and charming, with a wide
circle of friends and acquaintances. Even the local Mercer Island
police who’d run him in on many charges in the past couldn’t
believe he would commit murder.
By 1990, it was still unusual to see sexually based homicide
between races, but as society loosened up and became more
tolerant, we were beginning to see race as less of an issue. is
would be particularly true for a cooler, more sophisticated type
like Russell. He regularly dated both black and white women and
had friends in both races.
e strategic focal point came when Public Defender Miriam
Schwartz made a pretrial motion before King County Superior
Court judge Patricia Aitken to have the cases severed from each
other and tried separately, based on the premise that the three
murders were not committed by the same offender. e
prosecutors, Rebecca Roe and Jeff Baird, asked me to explain
how the crimes were all linked.
I mentioned the blitz-style MO attack in each one. Since the
three killings happened over a seven-week period, I would not
expect the offender to change his MO unless something had
gone wrong in one case and he felt a need to improve upon it.
But more compelling was the signature aspect.
All three women had been left naked and posed provocatively
and degradingly. e sexual content of the posed scene escalated
from one to the next. e first was posed with hands clasped and
legs crossed at the ankles and left near a sewer grate and trash
Dumpster. e second was posed on a bed with a pillow over her
head, her legs bent out to each side, a rifle inserted into her
vagina, and red high heels on her feet. e final one was posed
spreadeagled on her bed with a dildo in her mouth and the
second Joy of Sex book placed under her left arm.
e blitz attacks were necessary to kill these women. e
degrading posing was not.
I explained the difference between posing and staging.
Staging, I said, appears in crimes where the offender is trying to
throw off the investigation by making the police believe that
something happened other than what did, such as when a rapist
tries to make his intrusion look like a routine burglary. at
would be an aspect of MO. Posing, on the other hand, would be
signature.
“We don’t get that many cases of posing,” I testified at the
hearing, “treating the victim like a prop to leave a specific
message . . . . ese are crimes of anger, crimes of power. It’s the
thrill of the hunt, it is the thrill of the kill, and it is the thrill
afterwards of how that subject leaves that victim and how he’s
basically beating the system.”
I felt confident in saying, “e probability is extremely high
that it was a single suspect.” Bob Keppel, the chief criminal
investigator with the state attorney general’s office and a veteran
of the Green River Task Force, testified along with me, saying
that of more than a thousand murder cases he’d examined, only
about ten had included posing, and none had all of the elements
of these three.
At this point, we weren’t saying that Russell was the offender;
all we were saying was that whoever did one did all three.
e defense planned to bring in an expert to refute what I had
to say, to testily that I was wrong on signature and that these
three crimes were not committed by the same individual.
Ironically, that person was my longtime FBI colleague and serialkiller study partner, Robert Ressler, retired from the Bureau but
still consulting in the field.
I thought this was a pretty tight and compelling case for
anyone as experienced in profiling and crime-scene analysis as
both Bob and I were, and so I was extremely surprised that he
would be willing to come out on the other side and testify for
severance of the cases. To put it bluntly, I felt he was out-and-out
wrong. But as we’ve all admitted many times, what we do is far
from an exact science, so he was certainly entitled to his opinion.
Bob and I have since come out on opposite sides of a number of
issues, perhaps most noticeably as to whether Jeffrey Dahmer was
insane. Bob sided with the defense that he was. I agreed with
Park Dietz, who testified for the prosecution, that he was not.
I was therefore even more surprised when Bob said he had
other commitments and never showed up for the Russell pretrial
hearing, and instead sent another retired agent, Russ Vorpagel.
Russ is a bright guy. He was a chess champion who could play
against ten opponents at once. But profiling wasn’t his main
specialty, and I thought the facts were against him. He endured a
pretty hard time from Rebecca Roe when she cross-examined
him after he disputed my opinion. At the end of the hearing,
Judge Aitken ruled that based on the signature evidence Keppel
and I had presented regarding the likelihood of a single offender
in all three cases, they could be tried together.
I testified on signature again during the trial itself, refuting
the multiple-killer theory the defense had put forth. In the Carol
Beethe murder, defense attorney Schwartz suggested that her
boyfriend had both the opportunity and the motive. We always
study spouses or lovers in sexual homicides, and it was my firm
opinion that this was a sexually motivated “stranger” homicide.
In the end, a jury of six men and six women deliberated four
days and found George Waterfield Russell Jr. guilty of one count
of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated first-degree
murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without
possibility of parole and sent to the state’s maximum-security
penitentiary at Walla Walla.
is was my first time back in Seattle since my collapse and
coma there. It was good to be back and have a hand in solving a
case after the intense frustrations of Green River. I went back to
Swedish Hospital and was pleased to see they still had the plaque
I’d given them in thanks. I went back to the Hilton Hotel to see
if I could remember anything, but I couldn’t. I suspect that that
was just too much trauma for my mind to consciously process.
And anyway, after all the time I’d put in on the road for so many
years, hotel rooms all blend together.
We have now developed signature analysis to the point that
we testify routinely in serial-murder trials, not only I but other
profilers who’ve taken up my interest as well, most notably Larry
Ankrom and Greg Cooper.
In 1993, Greg Cooper played a major role in obtaining twin
first-degree murder convictions against Gregory Mosely, who had
raped, beaten, and stabbed two women in two separate
jurisdictions in North Carolina. Like the related crimes in the
Russell trial, it would have been difficult for either jurisdiction to
successfully convict on its own. Both had to have testimony
linking the cases, and after studying the crime-scene photos and
case files, Greg felt he could give it.
e key to signature analysis in the Mosely cases, Greg
decided, was overkill. Both victims were lonely, single, mildly
handicapped women in their early twenties who had attended
the same country-western nightclub, where they had been
abducted a couple of months apart. Both had been severely
beaten. You might say beaten to death, except for the fact that
they were also strangled manually and by ligature; one had been
stabbed twelve times, and there was evidence of vaginal and anal
penetration. ere was forensic evidence in one case, including
DNA from semen linking the crime to Mosely. Both rape-torture
murders had been committed in secluded areas and the bodies
dumped at isolated, remote sites.
Greg testified at the first trial that the signature behavioral
evidence indicated an inadequate personality who was a sexual
sadist. His inadequacy was clear from his choice of victims. His
sadism was even clearer from what he did to them. Unlike many
of the inadequate, disorganized types, this one didn’t kill them
before mutilating their bodies. He wanted to be in total physical
and emotional control. He wanted to be the author of their pain
and enjoy the response his cruelty provoked.
rough his testimony in the first case, Greg helped enable
the prosecution to introduce the second murder. Mosely was
convicted and sentenced to death. In the second trial nine
months later, Greg was able to do the same thing, achieving
another conviction and death sentence.
e first time he testified, Greg and Mosely locked eyes as
Greg described Mosely’s personality to the packed courtroom.
Greg could tell by the grim expression on Mosely’s face that he
was thinking, “How the hell could you know that?” e pressure
was intense. If Greg had been unsuccessful, the case would have
been thrown out and the second case could have been weakened
beyond salvage.
When Mosely first saw Greg at his second trial, he muttered
to his police escorts, “at’s the son of a bitch who’s gonna try to
get me again!”
Traditionally, to get a successful prosecution and conviction in
a murder case, you’ve needed conclusive forensic evidence,
eyewitness accounts or a confession, or good, strong
circumstantial evidence. Now, from our work in behavioral
profiling from crime scenes and signature analysis, there is
another arrow in the police’s and prosecution’s quiver. In and of
itself, it’s not usually enough to convict. But taken together with
one or more of the other elements, it can often link various
crimes together and be just what is needed to put a case over the
top.
Serial killers play a most dangerous game. e more we
understand the way they play, the more we can stack the odds
against them.
14
Who Killed the All-American
Girl?
Who killed the all-American girl?
at was the haunting question that had hung over the small
town of Wood River, Illinois, for four years. Among many
others, it obsessed Inspector Alva Busch of the state police, and it
obsessed Don Weber, the state’s attorney for Madison County.
e evening of Tuesday, June 20, 1978, Karla Brown and her
fiancé, Mark Fair, threw a party with plenty of beer and music
for the friends who had helped them move into their new home
at 979 Acton Avenue in Wood River. It was a single-story, white,
wooden-sided house on a tree-lined street, with slender round
columns flanking the front door, and they had spent the last two
weeks getting this typical starter home into move-in shape. It
represented an exciting new beginning for the twenty-three-yearold Karla and twenty-seven-year-old Mark. ey’d been going
together for five years when Mark had finally made it clear he’d
gotten over his male hesitancy and was ready to make the real
commitment. With Karla finishing up her degree at a local
college and Mark working as an apprentice electrician, their
future was bright.
Despite the years of putting off the big question, Mark Fair
knew how fortunate he was to have Karla as his intended wife.
Karla Lou Brown was the embodiment of the all-American girl.
Less than five foot tall, she had wavy blond hair, a knockout
figure, and a beauty queen’s smile. She had been the ideal of the
boys and the envy of the other girls at Roxana High School,
where everyone remembered her as a pert, peppy cheerleader.
Her closest friends knew a sensitive, introspective dimension
went along with the charming, flirty public side. ey knew she
was devoted to Mark, who was strong, athletically built, and
more than a foot taller than she. Together, Karla and Mark made
a terrific couple.
After the party Tuesday night they went back to their
apartment in East Alton to pack up the remaining boxes. ey
hoped to be ready to actually move in and sleep in the new place
the next night.
Wednesday morning, after Mark left for his job with Camp
Electric and Heating Company, Karla went over to Acton
Avenue, where she would organize and straighten until Mark got
off work about four-thirty. ey were excited about spending the
night there.
When Mark finished work, he went over to the house of his
friend Tom Fiegenbaum, who lived on the same block as Mark’s
parents and had agreed to help him move a large and unusual Aframe doghouse from the parents’ backyard.
ey got to Acton Avenue about five-thirty, and as Tom
backed his truck down the driveway, Mark went to get Karla. He
couldn’t find her, which meant she’d probably run out to get
something she needed for the house, but he noticed the back
door was unlocked. is bothered him. She was going to have to
be careful about that sort of thing.
Mark brought Tom in to show him the house. After showing
him the main floor, Mark led him into the kitchen and down the
stairs to the basement. When he reached the bottom stair, he
didn’t like what he saw. Several small tables were overturned.
ings seemed to be in a mess, despite the fact that he and Karla
had organized everything the night before. Something was spilled
on the sofa and the floor.
“What’s happening here?” Mark asked rhetorically. As he
turned to go back upstairs to try to find Karla, he saw through
the door to the laundry room.
ere was Karla, on her knees and bent forward, wearing a
sweater but naked from the waist down, her hands tied behind
her back with electrical cord, her head stuffed into a ten-gallon,
drumlike barrel filled with water. e barrel was one of the ones
he and Karla had used for moving clothes. And the sweater,
which had been packed in one of the barrels, was one she wore
only in winter.
“Oh my God! Karla!” Mark screamed as he and Tom raced
over. Mark pulled her head from the barrel and laid her back on
the floor. Her face was puffy and blue, with a deep cut across her
forehead and another on her jawline. Her eyes were open, but it
was obvious she was dead.
Mark collapsed in grief. He asked Tom to find something to
cover her with, and after Tom came back with a red blanket, they
called the police.
When Officer David George of the Wood River Police
Department arrived a few minutes later, Mark and Tom were
outside the front door waiting for him. ey led the officer down
to the basement and showed him the scene. roughout the
encounter, Mark was barely able to contain himself. “Oh, God,
Karla,” he kept repeating.
is kind of horror wasn’t supposed to happen in Wood
River, a quiet community about fifteen minutes from St. Louis.
Before long, all the top cops were there to see what was going on,
including thirty-nine-year-old chief of police, Ralph Skinner.
Karla showed signs of severe blunt-force trauma to the head,
possibly from the upset TV tray stand in the room. Two socks
were tied around her neck, and the autopsy would conclude that
she had died by strangulation and was already dead by the time
her head was submerged in the drum of water.
As much of a focus as this murder scene was, problems
dogged the police right from the beginning. Illinois State Police
inspector Alva Busch, an experienced crime-scene technician,
couldn’t get the flash attachment for his camera to work. Bill
Redfern, who had taken the call at the police station from Tom
Fiegenbaum, fortunately brought a camera and took crime-scene
photos but at the time happened to have only black-and-white
film in his camera. Another problem was all the people who had
been at the house helping the couple move. at was a lot of
potential fresh latent fingerprints legitimately at the scene.
Selecting out others would be difficult if not impossible.
Some elements appeared to be possible clues, but made no
sense. Most notable of these was a glass coffee carafe stuck up in
the rafters in the basement. Just before spotting it, police had
noted the carafe missing from the machine in the kitchen. No
one, including Mark, had any logical explanation for why it was
where it was, and its role in the murder, if any, wasn’t clear. Alva
Busch managed to lift a few latent prints from the glass surface,
but they didn’t turn out to be complete enough to use.
In the days following the murder, police combed the
neighborhood, talking to anyone who might possibly have seen
anyone. e next-door neighbor, Paul Main, said that on the day
of the murder, he was on his front porch much of the afternoon
with his friend John Prante. Prante recalled being at Main’s house
briefly that morning, just after applying for a job at a local oil
refinery, but said he left early to apply for other jobs. e night
before the murder, Main, Prante, and a third friend had watched
Karla, Mark, and the gang helping them move. All three of them
said they had hoped to be invited to the moving-in party since
Main was a neighbor and the other friend had known Karla
casually in high school. But they had never been asked to join in.
e closest they got was when the friend called to Karla from
across the driveway.
e neighbor across the street, an elderly woman named Edna
Vancil, remembered seeing a red car with a white roof parked in
front of 979 the day of the murder. Bob Lewis, one of the people
at the party, said he had seen Karla on the driveway talking to a
“rough-looking,” long-haired guy next door who had pointed to
Karla and called her by name. at would have been Paul Main’s
friend.
“You’ve got a good memory. It’s been a long time,” Lewis
heard Karla reply. He said he then told Mark Fair about the
encounter, suggesting that if those were the kinds of people they
were living next to, he’d better be careful until he got to know
them better. Mark didn’t seem concerned and said that Karla
knew the longhaired guy from high school and that he was just
visiting Paul Main.
Another woman was driving down the street, taking her
grandson to the dentist. She and the child saw a man and a
woman talking on the driveway, but even when she was
questioned under hypnosis, her description wasn’t much.
e police talked to many of Karla’s girlfriends, trying to find
out if anyone had a grudge against her, perhaps a spurned
boyfriend. But all of them said Karla was well liked and had no
enemies that they knew of.
One woman, Karla’s former roommate, did have an idea,
though. Karla’s father had died when she was young, and her
mother, Jo Ellen, had married Joe Sheppard Sr., from whom she
was now divorced. e roommate claimed that Karla had not
gotten along with Sheppard, and that he had hit her and was
always coming on to her friends. He had to be considered a
suspect. He had come over the night of the murder and barraged
the police with questions. As I’ve noted, it’s not unusual for a
killer to approach the police or otherwise inject himself into the
investigation. But there was no evidence linking Sheppard to the
crime.
e other person who had to be examined closely was Mark
Fair. Along with Tom Fiegenbaum, he had found the body, he
had access to the house, he was the closest person to the victim.
As I noted with regard to the George Russell case, the spouse or
lover always has to be considered. But Mark was at work for the
electrical contractor when the murder would have taken place; a
number of people had seen him and talked to him. And there
was no question in anyone’s mind—the police, Karla’s friends,
her family—that his grief was genuine and profound.
As the investigation geared up, the police polygraphed many
of the people they had interviewed, people who could have had
contact with Karla shortly before her death. Mark, Tom, and Joe
Sheppard passed without any ambiguity. No one really failed.
e closest was Paul Main, a man of marginal intellect who had
been at home next door that afternoon. ough he claimed John
Prante had been with him on his porch and could vouch for him
that he hadn’t left, Prante himself—who passed his polygraph
exam—acknowledged that he had left in the morning to look for
work and therefore couldn’t say where Main had been during
that time. But even though Main’s polygraph was questionable
and he remained a suspect, as with everyone else nothing tied
him directly to the crime.
e trauma of Karla Brown’s murder affected Wood River
deeply. It remained a wound that wouldn’t heal. Both the local
and state police had interviewed everyone they could find, had
followed up every possible lead. Yet frustratingly, they appeared
no closer to a solution. Months went by. en it was a year. en
two. It was particularly tough on Karla’s sister Donna Judson.
With her husband, Terry, they seemed involved on almost a daily
basis. Karla’s mother and her other sister, Connie Dykstra, were
unable to face that kind of intense involvement and had less
contact with the authorities working on the case.
It was also tough on Don Weber, the state’s attorney
responsible for Madison County, which contained Wood River.
He had been an assistant prosecutor at the time of the murder. A
combination of tough prosecutor and deeply sensitive man,
Weber desperately wanted to show the public that the kind of
outrage perpetrated on Karla would not be tolerated in his
district. He was practically obsessed with bringing her killer to
justice. Following his election in November 1980 to the top post
of state’s attorney, he promptly reactivated the case.
e other one who just couldn’t let the case rest, no matter
how long it dragged on without progress, was the state crimescene investigator, Alva Busch. ere are always a couple of cases
in a cop’s career that won’t let go. And it turned out to be
through Busch that this one finally got a critical push forward.
In June of 1980, a full two years after Karla’s killing, Busch
was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to testify in a murder trial in a
case in which he’d processed a stolen car in Illinois. While
waiting for the pretrial motions to be completed, he attended a
presentation at the sheriff’s department given by Dr. Homer
Campbell, an expert from the University of Arizona in the
computer enhancement of photographs.
“Hey, Doc,” Busch said to him at the end of the presentation,
“have I got a case for you.” Dr. Campbell agreed to examine the
crime-scene and autopsy photos to see if he could help determine
exactly the type of instrument or weapon that had been used on
Karla. Busch copied and sent all the relevant pictures to
Campbell.
at the photos were only black and white didn’t make the
job any easier, but Campbell was able to do a careful analysis
with his sophisticated equipment. rough computer
enhancement, he could essentially turn the photos inside out and
he was able to report several things. e deep gashes were made
by a claw hammer, and the cuts on the chin and forehead had
come from the wheels of the overturned TV tray table. But what
he told Busch next turned the case completely around and sent it
off in a new direction.
“What about the bite marks? Do you guys have any suspects
in the bite marks on her neck?”
“What bite marks?” was all Busch could think to say into the
phone.
Campbell told him that while the images he’d managed to
raise weren’t the best, they definitely showed bite marks on
Karla’s neck, clear enough that if a suspect was identified, they
could get a good comparison. One in particular didn’t overlap
any of the other wounds or marks on the skin.
Unlike anything else they had so far, bite marks were good,
solid evidence, practically the same as fingerprints. A comparison
of Ted Bundy’s teeth with bite marks found on the buttocks of a
murder victim in the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State
University had helped convict the notorious serial killer.
Campbell had been a prosecution witness at Bundy’s trial. (On
the morning of January 24, 1989, after extensive interviews and
conversations with Bill Hagmaier from our unit, Bundy was put
to death in the Florida electric chair. No one will ever know for
certain how many young lives he took.)
Once the Illinois police had Dr. Campbell’s bite-mark images,
they began refocusing on some of their original possibilities,
most notably the neighbor Paul Main. But after police obtained a
bite sample from Main, Campbell couldn’t match it to the crimescene and autopsy photographs. ey made an attempt to locate
Main’s friend John Prante to see if he would finger Main with
this added information, but they couldn’t find him.
ere were other attempts at a solution, including bringing in
a well-known Illinois psychic, who, without knowing any of the
details of the case, said, “I hear water dripping.” To the police,
this was a clear reference to the discovery of Karla’s body. But
beyond the fact that the killer lived near railroad tracks (most
people do in Madison County), the psychic didn’t offer much
help.
Even with the knowledge of the bite marks, little progress was
being made in the case. In July of 1981, Don Weber and four of
his staff members attended a seminar in New York on forensic
science in criminal investigations as part of setting up his new
administration as state’s attorney. Knowing Weber would be
there, Dr. Campbell suggested he bring the Brown case photos
and show them to Dr. Lowell Levine, a forensic odontologist
from New York University, who was speaking at the seminar.
Levine studied the photos but, after agreeing with Campbell that
certain of the wounds were definitely bite marks, said he could
not make a definitive match. He suggested that they exhume
Karla’s body, commenting that “a casket is cold storage for
evidence.” I didn’t know Levine personally, but I certainly did by
reputation. He had done the analysis in the Francine Elveson
case in New York. (He must have done a pretty damn good job,
too, since when Bill Hagmaier and Roseanne Russo went to
interview Carmine Calabro at the Clinton Correctional Facility,
he’d had all his teeth removed to avoid incriminating himself in
the appeal. Dr. Levine went on to head up the forensic science
unit for New York State.)
In March of 1982, Weber and two state police investigators
attended the annual training session for the St. Louis
Metropolitan Major Case Squad. I was at the meeting, giving an
overview of personality profiling and crime-scene analysis to the
large gathering. While I don’t personally remember the
encounter, Weber describes in his fascinating study of the case,
Silent Witness (with Charles Bosworth Jr.), that he and his
colleagues came up to me after my presentation and asked if
what I had just described could be used in their case. I apparently
told them to call me at my office when I got back to Quantico
and that I’d be happy to help them however I could.
Upon his return, Weber learned that Rick White of the Wood
River police had also been at the session and had independently
concluded that this would be a good approach in the Brown
investigation. White contacted me and we arranged for him to
come to Quantico with the crime-scene photos and to let me
analyze them on the spot and give my reactions. Weber was too
involved in cases being prepared for trial to come himself, but he
assigned Assistant State’s Attorney Keith Jensen in his place,
along with White, Alva Busch, and Randy Rushing, one of the
state police officials who’d been with him in St. Louis. e four
of them drove over eight hundred miles to Quantico in an
unmarked cruiser. e then-current Wood River police chief,
Don Greer, was on vacation in Florida, but flew up to
Washington to attend the meeting, too.
We met in the conference room. e four investigators had
spent much of the drive organizing their thoughts and theories to
present to me; they could not have known that I liked to come to
my own conclusions before being influenced by anyone else’s
ideas. We hit it off well, though. Unlike many situations in
which we’ve been brought in for political reasons or to cover
someone’s ass, these guys were here because they’d simply refused
to give up. ey really wanted to be here and were genuinely
anxious for anything I could do to steer them in the right
direction.
I hit it off particularly well with Alva Busch, who shared my
difficulty with authority. Like me, he was known to piss off a lot
of people with his outspokenness. In fact, Don Weber had had to
threaten to call in all his political markers for Busch to be
allowed to make the trip to Quantico.
I requested the crime-scene photos and spent several minutes
poring over them. I asked a few questions to orient myself, then
said, “Are you ready? You might want to record this.”
e first thing I told them was my experience told me that
when bodies ended up in water inside a house—a bath or shower
or a container—the object was not to wash away clues or
evidence, as we were seeing in Atlanta, but to “stage” the crime to
look like something other than what it actually was. en I said
that they had already undoubtedly interviewed the killer. He was
in the neighborhood or immediate vicinity. is kind of crime is
almost always a neighborhood or household crime. People don’t
travel long distances to commit them. If he got blood on him,
which he most certainly did, he had to be able to go someplace
close by to clean it off and get rid of his bloody clothing. Our
guy was comfortable in the situation and knew he wouldn’t be
disturbed, either because he knew Karla well or had been
observing her enough to know her and Mark’s habits. Since
you’ve talked to him, he has been cooperative with your
investigation. at way, he feels he can keep control of the
situation.
He didn’t go to Karla’s house that afternoon with the plan of
killing her. e killing was an afterthought. If he’d planned it, he
would have brought his weapons and implements (his “rape kit”)
with him. Instead, we have manual strangulation and blunt-force
trauma, demonstrating a spontaneous act of anger or desperation
in reaction to her rejection of him. Manipulation, domination,
and control are the watchwords of the rapist. He’d probably gone
over to the house offering to help her move in. Karla was known
as a friendly sort, and since she knew this guy in some way, she
probably let him in. What he wanted from her was sex, some sort
of a relationship. When she resisted or he realized he was in over
his head, he—like Mary Frances Stoner’s killer in South Carolina
—decided the only way to save himself was to kill her. And even
at that point, he probably panicked and had second thoughts.
ere was water on the floor and on the sofa. After he strangled
her, he might very well have splashed water on her face to try to
revive her. When that didn’t work, he would have had to deal
with her wet face, so he dragged her across the floor and pushed
her head in the tub to make it look like some bizarre or kinky
ritual; in other words, to draw attention away from what had
actually happened. e head in the tub of water had a secondary
significance as well. She had rejected him. Now he could degrade
her. As in so many other cases, the more an offender does at a
scene, even if it’s an attempt to throw the police off the scent, the
more clues and behavioral evidence he gives you to work with.
is guy is in his mid- to late twenties, I said, and this is not
the work of someone who has experience killing. His staging was
poor and shows he’s never tried to do it before. However, he does
have an explosive, assaultive personality, so he could have
committed lesser crimes. If he’s ever been married, he’s recently
been separated or divorced or is having marital discord. Like so
many of these guys, this one is a real loser with a poor self-image.
He may come across as confident, but deep down, he is
extremely inadequate.
He is of average intelligence and IQ, went no further than
high school, and his use of wire to bind her suggests shop
training or one of the vocational trades. Once the investigation
was launched, you would find him changing residences and/or
jobs, and once the heat was off and he wouldn’t create any
suspicion, he might very well leave town. He’d also be turning
heavily to drugs or alcohol or cigarettes to relieve his tension. In
fact, alcohol could have played some role in the crime itself. is
was a bold move for this particular guy. He may have been
drinking beforehand, which would have lowered his inhibition,
though he wouldn’t be drunk, because then he wouldn’t have
done so much on the scene postoffense.
He’d be having difficulty sleeping, he would have a problem
with his sex life, and you’d find him becoming more and more
nocturnal. If he had a regular job, he would have missed a lot of
work as the investigation geared up. He would change his
appearance, too. If he had a beard and long hair at the time of
the killing, he would have shaved them. If he was clean-shaven,
he would have grown a beard. You’re not looking for a preppie
type, though. He’s naturally scruffy and unkempt, and any
attempt to keep himself orderly will be an obvious manifestation
of overcontrol. He will find this effort physically and mentally
exhausting.
As to automobile, in this case I fell back on my old killer
standby—a Volkswagen Beetle. It would be old and not terribly
well maintained; red or orange.
is is someone who will be following the police investigation
closely in the media, and he will be taking his leads from them. If
the chief of police has publicly announced that there have been
no new leads, that’s going to give him a mechanism to cope. He
could easily have passed a polygraph; a lot of killers do. e next
phase of the investigation has to have as its goal to begin to shake
him up.
ere can be a lot of stressors. Every year in June he could
become more nervous. e same could happen around Karla’s
birthday, He’s probably been out to visit Karla’s grave at Calvary
Hill Cemetery. He may have sent flowers or asked her directly for
forgiveness.
So the next thing you’ve got to do, I said, is to announce a
new and promising lead, something that will appear to get the
case back on the front burner. Continuously advertise and
publicize this. Keep that “ass-pucker factor” as intense as
possible. Mention that you’ve brought an FBI profiler into the
case and that what he’s telling you fits in perfectly with the new
evidence you’ve developed.
At that point they told me of Dr. Levine’s recommendation to
exhume the body and wanted to know what I thought about it. I
told them it was a terrific idea, and the more public hoopla
leading up to it, the better. Weber should go on television
beforehand and announce that if the body is still in good shape
and the new examination turns up the evidence they expect, they
will be close to solving the murder. In a sense, what they would
be conveying to the killer is that they were “resurrecting” Karla,
bringing her back from the grave, to bear witness in her own
murder.
e digging up of the body will be a tremendous stressor to
him. I want Weber to state publicly that if it takes another
twenty years, he’s going to solve this case. Your offender is going
to be concerned and inquisitive. He’ll be asking a lot of
questions. He may even call the police directly! Make sure you
videotape or photograph everyone who shows up at the
cemetery; he may be there. He’s going to be in a lot of suspense
about what shape the body is in. And when you finally announce
how pleased you are with its condition, that’s going to send him
farther over the edge. At the same time, he’ll become even more
of a loner, isolating himself from whatever friends he has. is
will be the time to start listening to people in bars and places like
that to see if any of the regulars are displaying markedly changed
behavior. He may recently have joined a church or taken up
religion as a means to cope. And while you’re putting all this
stress on him, there should be a comment in the paper from one
of the cops—it could even be from me—that sounds almost
empathic. We should say we know what he’s going through, that
he did not intend to kill her and has been carrying this huge
weight on his shoulders all these years.
I went on to outline an interrogation strategy similar to what
had worked in the Stoner case. e important thing was that
once a suspect had been identified, he shouldn’t be arrested right
away but left to stew for a week or so, then you’d want to get him
to confess before arresting him. e more facts you have at your
disposal, the more things you can say, like, “We know you
carried her from here to here” or “We know about the water,” the
better shot you’ll have. An object that had a material role in the
murder (such as the rock in the Stoner case) would be good to
have in the room.
After hearing my impressions, my five visitors seemed to take
what I had said to heart. ey asked how I could tell all that just
by hearing routine details of the case and looking at photographs.
I’m not sure of the answer to that, though Ann Burgess has noted
that I’m a visual person and like to work first from what I can
look at. She says, and it’s probably true, that I have a tendency in
consultations to say “I see” rather than “I think.” Part of it
probably has to do with not being able to be on-scene most of
the time, so I’ve got to re-create the environment within my
head. Often, when police would call me back several years after
I’d analyzed a case for them, I could recall it and what I’d said
about the UNSUB if they would just describe the crime scene to
me.
e investigators from Illinois said that from what I told
them, two of their many interviewees still looked like strong
suspects—Paul Main and his friend John Prante. Both had been
next door that day, and at least one of them, Prante, had been
drinking beer. eir stories had never quite squared with each
other, which could have been the result of their low intelligence
and drinking, or could have meant that one or both of them
were lying. Prante had done better than Main on the polygraph,
but they both fit the profile well. In fact, in some ways Prante fit
better. He had been more cooperative with the police, and after
the heat had died down, he had left town as I predicted the killer
would, only to return later on.
I said that the campaign I had outlined could be used against
both of them. In fact, since I thought whoever had done it felt
periodic guilt and remorse, a bit of extra flair might involve
having a woman portray Karla and call each of them in the
middle of the night, sobbing and asking, “Why? Why? Why?”
is should coincide with articles in the paper about what an allAmerican girl Karla had been and how tragic it was that she had
been cut down in her prime. I’ve always gone for the theatrical
touch.
Once the campaign had been on for about a week or ten days,
the police could see if either Main or Prante was reacting in the
way I’d said the killer would. If one of them was, then the next
step would be to use informants—friends, acquaintances, work
associates—to try to draw comments or a confession out of him.
e exhumation of the body on June 1, 1982, was handled
just the way I’d hoped, with Lowell Levine on the scene, a lot of
television and press coverage, and appropriately solemn and
optimistic statements from Weber. I’ve found that in smaller
towns it’s a lot easier to get the kind of cooperation you need
from journalists than it is in big cities, where they’re much more
apt to feel you’re trying to manipulate them or tell them what to
print. I see it more as a cooperative effort between the press and
law enforcement that shouldn’t compromise the integrity of
either. I’ve never asked a newspaper or TV reporter to lie or
produce a false or incomplete story. But on many occasions, I
have given out the information I needed to have an UNSUB
read and react to. When reporters are cooperative with me, I’m
cooperative with them. And in certain cases, when they’ve been
particularly cooperative, I’ve given them exclusives when the
inside story could finally be told.
Fortunately, Karla’s body was in amazingly well-preserved
condition. e new autopsy was performed by Dr. Mary Case,
an assistant medical examiner for the city of St. Louis. Unlike in
the first postmortem, Dr. Case determined that the cause of
death was drowning. She also found a skull fracture. Most
important, they got the bite-mark evidence they needed.
e organized publicity campaign continued in earnest. Tom
O’Connor of the state police and Wayne Watson of the Financial
Fraud and Forgery Unit interviewed Main at his house,
ostensibly about public-aid payments he was receiving that he
was possibly ineligible for. ey led him into a discussion of
Karla Brown’s murder. While he wouldn’t confess and denied any
involvement in the crime, he had definitely been closely
following the publicity and had some inside information. For
example, Watson mentioned that Main had left out Acton
Avenue on his list of previous addresses. He said he had been
trying to forget because of bad memories of the cops hassling
him about the neighbor girl who got killed there.
Watson said, “She’s the one who was shot, strangled, and
drowned in a fifty-gallon barrel.”
“No, no! Not shot, not shot!” Main replied emphatically.
Just around the time of the exhumation, a man named Martin
Higdon went to the Wood River police and said he’d gone to
high school with Karla Brown and that all of the current
publicity had led to discussions at work. He thought the police
should know that a woman he worked with claimed that at a
party not long after the murder, a man said he had been at Karla’s
house on the day she was killed.
O’Connor and Rick White interviewed the woman, whose
name was Vicki White (no relation). She confirmed the story,
saying she and her husband, Mark, had been at a party at
Spencer and Roxanne Bond’s house, where she’d spoken to a man
she’d known at Lewis and Clark Community College. e man
said he had been at Karla’s house the day of the murder. He
mentioned where she had been found and that she had been
bitten on her shoulder. He was going to have to leave town
because he thought he would be considered a prime suspect. At
the time, she’d discounted this as idle talk.
His name was John Prante.
How could he have known about the bite marks so soon after
the murder when the police didn’t know about them until two
years later? O’Connor and White asked each other. ey then
interviewed the party’s host, Spencer Bond, who had the same
recollection as Vicki and Mark White. Bond also mentioned that
Main had given him details about how Karla was found. e
question was whether Main had gotten the information from
Prante, or vice versa. ough Prante had done better on the
polygraph, Weber and the police didn’t think Main was bold
enough to have carried out such a crime or smart enough to have
set up Prante.
Bond had recently seen Prante, driving his old red
Volkswagen Minibus. ough I’d gotten the color and make
right, I’d missed out on the model. But this, in itself, was
significant. About this time, we were starting to see a shift in
vehicle of preference to vans. Bittaker and Norris used one.
Steven Pennell used one. Unlike a car, in the back of a van you
can do whatever you want and not be seen. You have, in effect, a
mobile murder site.
I was not surprised to hear that John Prante had grown a
beard since the murder. Bond agreed to wear a wire while he
spoke to Prante about the case. While Prante didn’t admit the
killing, he revealed how closely he fit the profile. He had studied
welding at Lewis and Clark. He had left town after the murder.
He had been divorced and had trouble with women. He was
extremely curious about the investigation.
ursday, June 3, Weber’s office secured a court order
compelling Prante to submit to a dental impression the next day.
Chief Don Greer told him they were trying to tie up loose ends,
and if he didn’t match, they could eliminate him as a suspect.
After leaving the dentist’s office, Prante called Weber, just as I
figured he would. He wanted to know what was going on with
the investigation. Weber had the presence of mind to get his
assistant Keith Jensen on the line at the same time, just to make
sure Weber couldn’t later be knocked out of the case as a
potential witness. In talking with Weber, Prante contradicted his
earlier story about when he’d been at Paul Main’s house. As I
predicted, he appeared cooperative.
e police got more information from a second wired
exchange between Bond and Prante, then even more from a
taped conversation between Bond and Main. Prante told Bond
he was up to several packs of cigarettes a day, Main went so far as
to suggest that perhaps Karla had set Prante off by rejecting his
sexual advances. at led to another police interview with Main,
in which he stated that he believed Prante was responsible for the
murder, though he recanted after a private conversation with
Prante.
e following Tuesday, Weber, Rushing, and Greer flew to
Long Island to see Dr. Levine. ey gave him the new autopsy
photographs and three sets of dental impressions: Main’s, those
of another long-standing suspect, and Prante’s. Levine eliminated
the first two right away. He couldn’t say with scientific certainty
that only Prante’s teeth out of the whole world would match up,
but they did—perfectly. Paul Main was arrested and charged
with obstructing justice.
Prante was charged with murder and burglary with intent to
commit rape. He went to trial in June of 1983. In July, he was
found guilty and sentenced to seventy-five years in prison.
It had taken four years, but through the combined efforts of
many dedicated people, a killer was finally brought to justice. I
was particularly pleased and gratified to receive a copy of a letter
Assistant State’s Attorney Keith Jensen sent to FBI director
William Webster. In it he wrote, “e community finally feels
safe, and the family feels justice has been done, none of which
could have happened without John Douglas. While he is an
extremely busy man, I feel his efforts should not go unnoticed. I
extend my sincere thanks and wish that there were more John
Douglases available with the competency, capacity, and ability to
assist as he did.”
ese were kind words indeed. Fortunately, though, the
previous January I had been able to make my case to Jim
McKenzie, the assistant director of the Academy, that we did
need “more John Douglases.” In turn, he’d managed to sell
headquarters, even though it meant stealing bodies from other
programs. at was how I got Bill Hagmaier, Jim Horn, Blaine
McIlwaine, and Ron Walker in the first go-round, then Jim
Wright and Jud Ray in the second. As time soon told, they all
made sizable contributions.
Despite everyone’s best efforts, some cases, like Karla Brown’s,
take years to close. Others just as complex can be solved in a
matter of days or weeks if everything breaks right.
When a stenographer named Donna Lynn Vetter in one of
the FBI’s southwestern field offices was raped and murdered in
her ground-floor apartment one night, Roy Hazelwood and Jim
Wright were given an unambiguous order from the Director’s
Office: get down there immediately and solve the case. By that
time, we had divided the country into regions. is one fell in
Jim’s territory.
e message had to be loud and clear: you don’t get away with
killing FBI personnel, and we’ll do whatever we have to to make
sure. At two the next afternoon, an FBI Hostage Rescue Team
helicopter carried the two agents and their hastily packed bags
from Quantico to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where
they boarded a Bureau jet. Upon landing, they went immediately
to the crime scene, which had been held intact for them by the
local police.
Vetter was a white, twenty-two-year-old woman who’d grown
up on a farm, and even though she’d worked for the Bureau for
more than two years, she’d moved to the city only eight months
before. Naive to the dangers of urban life, she’d taken an
apartment in an industrial, predominantly black and Hispanic
area. e resident manager was cognizant of security
considerations. She had installed a white porch-type lightbulb—
instead of the regular yellow one—over the door of each
apartment where a single female tenant lived, so that her staff
and the security guards would pay special attention. e system
was not made public. But for all its good intentions, the code
would have been quickly transparent to even the most casual
snooper.
Police had been called shortly after 11 P.M. when one of the
other residents noticed the apartment’s window screen had been
ripped out and called the complex’s security guard. e victim’s
nude body, beaten about the face and bearing multiple stab
wounds, was covered with blood. e autopsy showed she had
been raped.
e assailant forced entry through the front window,
knocking over a large potted plant on his way in. e telephone
cord had been unplugged from the wall. Large, hideous
bloodstains were on the dining-room carpet and kitchen floor,
where the main attack seemed to have taken place. One stain
where the body had lain looked eerily like a life-size angel, her
wings spread as if in flight. e blood tracks indicated the victim
was then dragged into the living room. From the defense wounds
on the body, it seemed that she had gone for a kitchen knife, but
he had grabbed it and turned it on her.
Vetter’s bloodstained clothing was found by the emergency
medical team at the edge of the kitchen floor near the cabinets.
Her shorts and panties were rolled, indicating they’d been
removed by the attacker while she was lying on the floor. When
police arrived at the scene, the lights in the apartment were off.
ey speculated that the offender had probably turned them off
to delay discovery after he left.
From everything they learned from coworkers, family, and
neighbors, the young woman was shy, honest, and devout. She
had grown up in a strict and solid religious environment, and she
took her religion seriously. She wasn’t in any way glamorous and
seemed to have little, if any, social life, either with men or her
coworkers, who described her as conscientious and hardworking
but “different.” is probably had a lot to do with her lack of
sophistication and sheltered upbringing. No one suggested any
kind of illicit behavior or hanging around with the “wrong kind.”
No drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or birth control pills were in her
apartment. Her parents were absolutely convinced of her chastity
and said they thought she would do anything to protect her
virginity.
After studying the scene, that was what Roy and Jim
concluded had happened. While there was blood all over the
place, one particular bloodstain aroused their special interest. It
was right outside the bathroom door. Inside the bathroom, they
noticed urine but no tissue in the bowl of the unflushed toilet.
is gave them an immediate sense of what had taken place
between the intruder and the victim. She must have been in the
bathroom when she heard the break-in. She got up without
taking the time to flush and went out to see what was going on.
As soon as she passed through the bathroom door, he hit her
hard in the face, essentially trying to neutralize her. Jim and Roy
found the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, hidden under a seat
cushion in the living room.
e murder weapon itself told them something—that the
UNSUB had not broken into the apartment with the intention
of murder. And the fact that nothing of value was taken
suggested he had come with intentions other than burglary. e
evidence suggested he was there to rape. Had he been there to
murder, rather than spend time with her, there would have been
no reason to unplug the phone. e easy access of the apartment,
the victim’s plainness, his blitzing her before he’d even said a
word to her, all pointed to an angry, macho type with low
intelligence and no social skills or confidence in his ability to
control someone else through words. Unless he completely
controlled this unthreatening victim right from the beginning, he
knew he couldn’t succeed in his goal.
What he hadn’t counted on was how fiercely this shy, quiet
woman would resist. Everything in her background told the
profilers that this was exactly what she would do to defend her
honor. But the attacker wouldn’t have known. e more she
fought him, the more he was in danger of losing control, and the
more his rage grew. With the Karla Brown case, another rape that
turned to murder, I felt the assailant’s rage was secondary to his
need to “deal with” the mess he’d created. In this killing, it
looked as if the rage and need to deal with the victim had equal
importance. e anger in this case was sustained rather than
momentary. e drag marks showed that after he attacked her in
the kitchen, he dragged her into another room where he raped
her, bleeding and dying.
Roy and Jim began preparing their profile the very evening
they arrived. ey were looking for a man between twenty and
twenty-seven years of age. Normally, in a sexually based or lust
murder, if the victim was white, you would expect the offender
to be white, too. But the agents firmly believed this had started
out as a rape, and so the “rules” of rape applied. is was a
predominantly black and Hispanic apartment complex and
neighborhood, with a high incidence in the area of white women
being raped by black men, so there was a very strong chance the
killer was probably black.
ey didn’t think the UNSUB would be married, but he
could have been living in a financially dependent or exploitive
relationship with someone. Any woman who had a relationship
with him would be younger, less experienced, or in some way
easy to influence. He would not be involved with anyone he
found challenging or in any way intimidating. While he would
be of fairly low intelligence and have an unspectacular record in
school (where he’d probably been a behavior problem), he would
be streetwise and able to take care of himself in a fight. He would
want to seem macho and tough to those around him, and he
would wear the best clothing he could afford. Likewise, he would
be athletic and try to stay in good condition.
He would live within walking distance of the scene, in a
lower-income rental unit. He’d have some menial job and would
be in frequent conflict with coworkers or authority figures.
Because of his explosive temper, he wouldn’t have been in the
military, or if he had, he would have been discharged. e agents
didn’t think he had killed before, but would have burglarized and
assaulted. Roy Hazelwood, one of the leading experts on rape
and crimes against women, believed strongly that he had a past
history of rape or sexual assault.
ey predicted his postoffense behavior, which in many ways
mirrored that of Karla Brown’s killer, including absence from
work, heavier drinking, weight loss, and a change in appearance.
Most important, they felt that this type of individual would
mention his crime or confide in a family member or close
associate. And that could be the key to a proactive strategy for
catching him.
Since they knew the UNSUB would be following the news,
Roy and Jim decided to make their profile public, submitting for
interviews with the local press. e only significant detail they
withheld was the racial factor. In case they were wrong, they
didn’t want to lead the investigation astray and misdirect
potential leads.
But what they did make as public as possible was their belief
that whomever the UNSUB had talked to about the murder was
in grave danger him—or her—self, now that he or she knew this
incriminating information. If you recognize yourself in this
situation, they urged, please contact authorities before it’s too
late. Within two and a half weeks, the offender’s armed-robbery
partner called the police. e subject was apprehended, and
based on a matchup of palm prints found at the murder scene,
he was charged.
When we went over the profile afterward, we found that Jim
and Roy had been right on the money. e offender was a
twenty-two-year-old black male who lived four blocks from the
crime scene. He was single, lived with, and was financially
dependent on, his sister. At the time of the murder he was on
probation for rape. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to
death. His execution was carried out only recently.
I’ve often told my people that we should be like the Lone
Ranger, riding into town, helping to bring about justice, then
quietly riding out again.
Who were those masked men? ey left this silver bullet behind.
em? Oh, they were from Quantico.
In this particular case, Jim and Roy rode out of town quietly.
ey had been rushed down in a private Bureau jet. When their
work was done, they flew home tourist class, crammed in with
happy vacationers and screaming kids in the back of a
commercial flight. But we knew what they’d done, and so did all
the recipients of the “silver bullets” they had left behind.
15
Hurting the Ones We Love
Going over case files in his windowless office at Quantico one
day, Gregg McCrary got a phone call from one of the police
departments in his region. It was one of those anguishing cases
you seem to hear about all too often.
A young single mother was leaving her garden apartment
complex to go shopping with her two-year-old son. Just before
she got into her car, she suddenly developed stomach cramps, so
she turned around, hurried back across the parking lot, and went
into a rest room just inside the apartment building’s back door. It
was a safe, friendly neighborhood where everyone knew everyone
else, and she gave her little boy strict instructions to stay inside
the building and play quietly until she came out.
I’m sure you’ve already anticipated what happened next. It’s
about forty-five minutes before she’s finished in the bathroom.
She comes out and the child isn’t in the hall. Not yet alarmed,
she goes outside and looks around, figuring he’s just wandered off
a little, even though the weather is chilly and brisk.
But then she sees it: one of her little boy’s knit mittens, lying
on the pavement of the parking lot and no sign of him anywhere.
Now she panics.
She rushes back to her apartment and immediately dials 911.
Frantically, she tells the emergency operator that her child’s been
kidnapped. e police arrive quickly and comb the area looking
for clues. By this time the young woman is hysterical.
e news media picks up the story. She goes before the
microphones and pleads to whoever took her son to bring him
back. As sympathetic as the police are, they want to cover their
bases, so they quietly administer a polygraph, which she passes.
ey know that in any child abduction, time is of the essence,
which is why they call Gregg.
He hears the scenario and listens to a recording of the 911
call. ere’s something about it he doesn’t like. en there’s a
new development. e agonized woman receives a small parcel in
the mail. It has no return address, no note or communication
enclosed—just the matching mitten to the one she found in the
parking lot. e woman goes to pieces.
But now Gregg knows. He tells the police the little boy is
dead and that his mother killed him.
How do you know? the police press him. Children get
snatched away by perverts all the time. How do you know this
isn’t one of those cases?
So Gregg explains. First, there was the scenario itself. No one
is more fearful of a child getting snatched away by a pervert than
a mother. Is it logical that she would leave her son unattended for
that long a period? If she had to be in the bathroom for an
extended time, wouldn’t she have taken him in with her or made
some other makeshift arrangement? It’s possible that it happened
the way she said, but then you start compounding the factors.
On the 911 tape, she distinctly says that someone
“kidnapped” her child. It’s been Gregg’s experience that parents
will do almost anything to psychologically deny such a horrible
situation. In the heat of hysterical emotion, you might expect to
hear her say he was missing, he ran off, she doesn’t know where
he is, or something like that. For her to use the word kidnap at
this stage suggests she is already thinking ahead in the scenario
that will play out.
e tearful plea before the news media is certainly not
incriminating in itself, though we are now all haunted by the
image of Susan Smith in South Carolina pleading for the safe
return of her two young sons. Generally, parents we see doing
this are completely on the level. But the problem is that this kind
of public display tends to legitimize the few who aren’t.
What capped it for Gregg, though, was the return of the
mitten.
Basically, children are abducted for one of three reasons:
they’re taken by kidnappers for profit; they’re taken by child
molesters for sexual gratification; and they’re taken by pathetic,
lonely, unstable people who desperately want a child of their
own. e kidnapper will have to communicate with the family,
either by phone or written message, to set out his demand. e
other two types want nothing at all to do with the family. None
of the three merely send back an artifact to let the family know
the child was taken. e family already knows that. If there is to
be some proof of the legitimacy of the crime, it will accompany a
demand; otherwise, it’s meaningless.
What Gregg decided the mother had done was to stage a
kidnapping according to her perception of what a real one would
be like. Unfortunately for her, she had no idea of the actual
dynamics of this type of crime, and so she blew it.
Quite clearly, she had reasons for what she had done and
could therefore convince herself that she had done nothing
wrong. at was why she passed the polygraph. But Gregg wasn’t
satisfied with that. He brought in an experienced FBI polygraph
expert and had her retested, this time with the knowledge that
she was a suspect. And this time the results were completely
different. After some directed questioning, she admitted having
murdered her child and led police to the body.
Her motive was the common one, the one Gregg had
suspected all along. She was a young single mother, missing out
on all the fun of her late teens and early twenties because she was
saddled with this child. She had met a man who wanted to
intensify their involvement and start a new family of their own.
But he had made it clear that there was no room in their life
together for this kid.
What is significant about this type of case is, had the police
come upon the body without having had the child reported
missing, Gregg would still have come to the same conclusion.
e child was found buried in the woods in his snowsuit,
wrapped in a blanket, then completely covered with a thick
plastic bag. A kidnapper or child molester would not have taken
this much care to make him warm and “comfortable,” or to try
to shelter the body from the elements. While many murder
scenes show obvious and prolonged rage, and dump sites often
show contempt and hostility, the hallmarks of this burial were
love and guilt.
e human race has a long history of hurting the ones we love
or should love. In fact, during Alan Burgess’s first television
interview after becoming Behavioral Science Unit chief, he
stated, “We’ve had violence for generations and generations,
going all the way back to Bible days when Cain shot Abel.”
Fortunately, the reporters didn’t seem to catch his
reinterpretation of the world’s first murder weapon.
One of the major cases of nineteenth-century England
involved allegations of intrafamily violence. In 1860, Scotland
Yard inspector Jonathan Whicher went to the town of Frome in
Somerset on the murder of a baby named Francis Kent, from a
prominent family in the area. e local police were convinced
the child had been killed by Gypsies, but after investigating,
Whicher became convinced that the actual culprit was Francis’s
sixteen-year-old sister, Constance. Because of the family’s stature
and the very idea that a teenage girl could possibly kill her baby
brother, Whicher’s evidence was overruled in court and
Constance was acquitted of the charges he had brought against
her.
A huge public reaction against Whicher forced him to resign
from Scotland Yard. For years, he worked on his own to prove
he’d been right and that this young woman was a murderess.
Eventually, bankruptcy and poor health made him abandon his
quest for the truth—a year before Constance Kent confessed to
the crime. She was tried again and sentenced to life in prison.
ree years later, Wilkie Collins based his groundbreaking
detective novel, e Moonstone, on the Kent case.
e key to many murders of and by loved ones or family
members is staging. Anyone that close to the victim has to do
something to draw suspicion away from himself or herself. One
of the earliest examples I worked on was the murder of Linda
Haney Dover in Cartersville, Georgia, the day after Christmas in
1980.
ough she and her husband, Larry, were separated, they
remained on reasonably cordial terms. e five-foot-two, 120pound, twenty-seven-year-old Linda regularly came over to the
house they used to share to clean for him. In fact, that’s what she
was doing that Friday, December 26. Larry, meanwhile, took
their young son out for a day in the park.
When the two of them return from their outing in the
afternoon, Linda’s no longer there. But instead of finding a clean,
straight house, Larry sees the bedroom is a mess. Sheets and
pillows are pulled off the bed, dresser drawers are half-open,
clothing is strewn around, and red stains that look like blood are
on the carpet. Larry instantly calls the police, who rush over and
search the house, inside and out.
ey find Linda’s body wrapped in the comforter from the
bedroom, with only her head exposed, in the outside crawl space
under the house. As they unwrap the blanket, they see that her
shirt and bra have been pushed up above her breasts, her jeans
are around her knees, and her panties have been pulled down to
just below her pubic area. ere is blunt-force trauma to the
head and face and multiple stab wounds, which appear to the
officers to have been made after the bra was pushed up. ey
believe the weapon to be a knife from an open kitchen drawer,
but they can’t find it (and never do). e crime scene indicates
that she had been assaulted initially in a bedroom, then her body
was moved outside and into the crawl space. Blood drops on her
thighs show that the killer had handled and positioned her.
Nothing in her background made Linda Dover a particularly
high-risk victim. ough she was separated from Larry, she
wasn’t involved in any other relationships. e only unusual
stress factors would be the holiday time of year and whatever led
up to the disintegration of her marriage.
Based on the crime-scene photos and the information the
Cartersville police sent me, I told them the UNSUB would be
one of two types. Quite possibly, he would be a young and
inexperienced, inadequate loner who lived nearby and essentially
stumbled into this crime of opportunity. Police mentioned after I
said this that they’d been having problems with a neighborhood
thug, whom many of the residents were afraid of.
But the crime had too many staging elements, which made
me lean toward the second type: someone who knew the victim
well and therefore wanted to divert attention from himself. e
only reason a killer would have felt the need to hide the body on
the premises was what we classify as a “personal cause homicide.”
e trauma to the face and neck seemed highly personal, too.
I told them I felt this UNSUB was intelligent but only
educated through high school and had a job requiring physical
strength. He would have a history of assaultive behavior and a
low frustration level. He would be moody, unable to accept
defeat, and was probably depressed for one reason or another at
the time of the murder, most likely from money problems.
e staging had its own internal logic and rationale. Whoever
had brutalized Linda did not want to leave her body out in the
open where another family member—particularly her son—
might find it. at’s why he took the time to wrap her in the
blanket and move her to the crawl space. He wanted to make this
look like a sex crime—hence the raising of the bra and exposure
of the genital area—though there was no evidence of rape or
sexual assault. He thought he had to do this, but still felt
uncomfortable with police seeing her bare genitals and breasts, so
he covered them with the blanket.
I said the offender would be overly cooperative and concerned
at first, but would turn arrogant and hostile when challenged on
his alibi. His postoffense behavior might include increased
drinking or drug use, or perhaps a turn toward religion. He
would have changed his appearance, maybe even changed jobs
and moved out of the area. I told the police to look for a total
reversal in behavior and personality.
“e way he is today is nothing like the way he was prior to
the homicide,” I said.
What I didn’t know was that, at the time the Cartersville
police requested the profile from me, they had already charged
Larry Bruce Dover with his wife’s murder and wanted to make
sure they were on the right track. is really ticked me off for
several reasons. For one, I had more active cases than I could
handle. But more importantly, this put the Bureau in what could
potentially be an uncomfortable position. Fortunately for all
concerned, the profile turned out to be a perfect match. As I
explained to the Director and the Atlanta SAC, if it hadn’t been
so accurate, a skillful attorney might have been able to subpoena
me as a defense witness and force me to say that my “expert”
profile pointed away from the defendant in certain areas. From
that point on, I learned always to ask police if they had a suspect,
even though I didn’t want to know in advance who it was.
But at least justice was served in this case. On September 3,
1981, Larry Bruce Dover was convicted of the murder of Linda
Haney Dover and sentenced to life behind bars.
A variation on the theme of domestic staging came with the
murder of Elizabeth Jayne Wolsieffer, known as Betty, in 1986.
Just after seven on the morning of Saturday, August 30, police
in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, were called to 75 Birch Street, the
home of a popular dentist and his family. Upon arriving about
five minutes later, Officers Dale Minnick and Anthony George
encountered thirty-three-year-old Dr. Edward Glen Wolsieffer,
who was lying on the floor, the victim of an attempted
strangulation and a blow to the head. His brother, Neil, was
there with him. Neil explained that he lived across the street, had
been called by his brother, and had rushed over. Glen had been
stunned and disoriented and said Neil’s was the only phone
number he could remember. As soon as Neil got here, he had
been the one who called the police.
e men said that Glen’s thirty-two-year-old wife, Betty, and
their five-year-old daughter, Danielle, were upstairs. Every time
Neil started to go up to check on them, Glen had felt faint or
begun moaning again, so neither of them had been upstairs yet.
Glen told Neil he was afraid an intruder was still in the house.
Officers Minnick and George search the house. ey don’t
find an intruder, but they come upon Betty dead in the master
bedroom. She’s on her side, lying on the floor next to the bed
with her head toward the foot of the bed. From the bruises on
her neck, the drying foam around her mouth, and the bluish
coloring of her bruised face, it appears she’s been manually
strangled. e bedsheets are stained with blood, but her face
seems to have been cleaned off. She’s clad only in her nightgown,
which has been pushed up to her waist.
Danielle is asleep and unharmed in the next bedroom. When
she wakes up, she tells the police she didn’t hear anything—no
sounds of breaking in or fighting or any commotion.
Without describing the scene upstairs, Minnick and George
come back down and ask Dr. Wolsieffer what happened. He says
he was awakened just as it was getting light by a noise that
sounded like someone breaking into the house. He got his
handgun from the night table and went to investigate without
waking Betty.
As he neared the bedroom door, he saw a large man at the top
of the stairs. e man didn’t seem to spot him, and he followed
him downstairs, but then lost him and started looking around
the first floor for him.
Suddenly, he was attacked from behind with some kind of
cord or ligature, but he was able to drop his gun and slip his
hand in before it could tighten around his throat. Glen then
kicked back, hitting the man in the groin and causing him to
loosen his grip. Before Glen could turn around, though, he was
struck in the head from behind and blacked out. When he awoke
sometime later, he called his brother.
Dr. Wolsieffer’s visible injuries don’t appear serious to the
police or the paramedics they’ve called to the scene—a contusion
on the back of the head, pink marks on the back of the neck,
small scratches on the left side of his ribs and chest. But they
don’t want to take chances, so they have him taken to the
emergency room. He doesn’t look too bad to the doctor there,
either, but he admits him based on the dentist’s report of having
been unconscious.
From the beginning, the police were suspicious of Wolsieffer’s
story. It didn’t seem logical that an intruder would enter the
home from a second-story window in daylight. Outside, they
found an old ladder leading to the open window of the back
bedroom the intruder allegedly used as his entrance. But the
ladder was so rickety, it didn’t look as if it could support the
weight of even an average-size person. It was leaning against the
side of the house with the rungs facing the wrong direction. e
ladder had made no indentations in the soft ground to indicate
that any weight had been placed on it, nor were there any
markings on the aluminum gutters it was resting against. And no
dew or grass was on the rungs or roof near the window as there
should have been had someone used it that morning.
ere were also contradictory indicators inside the house.
Nothing of value appeared to have been taken, not even any
jewelry that would have been apparent in the bedroom. And if
the intruder intended to kill, why would he leave an unconscious
man with a gun nearby downstairs and go back upstairs to kill,
but not sexually assault, his wife?
Two points were especially disturbing. If Glen had been
choked to the point of passing out, why were there no marks on
the front of his neck? And the most unfathomable part of all:
neither Glen nor his brother, Neil, had gone upstairs to check on
Betty and Danielle.
To further fuzz things up, Dr. Wolsieffer’s story evolved as
time went on. His description of the intruder grew more explicit
as he recalled more details. e man wore a dark sweatshirt, a
stocking mask, and had a mustache, Wolsieffer said. He
contradicted himself on several points. He told family members
he’d been out late Friday night but talked to his wife before going
to sleep. He had told police that he never awakened her. Initially,
he had reported that about $1,300 had been taken from a desk
drawer, but later took that back when police found a deposit slip
for the money. When police tried to question him after they
arrived on the emergency call, he seemed only barely conscious
and practically incoherent, yet when told at the hospital of his
wife’s death, he referenced having heard the police call for the
coroner.
As long as the investigation continued, Glen Wolsieffer came
up with newer and more elaborate scenarios to explain the attack.
Eventually, the number of intruders grew to two. He had
admitted having an affair with a former dental assistant but told
police he had ended it a year ago. Yet later he conceded that he’d
just seen—and had sex with—the woman a few days before the
murder. And he’d neglected to tell police about another affair he
was having at the same time with a married woman.
Betty Wolsieffer’s friends told police that as much as she loved
her husband and had tried to make things work, she was tired of
his behavior, particularly the late Friday nights, which had
become a regularity. Days before she was killed, she had told a
friend she was going to “take a stand” if Glen stayed out late
again the coming Friday.
Following the initial interviews at his home and the hospital,
Glen refused to talk to police on the advice of his lawyer. So they
focused on his brother, Neil. His story of that morning seemed
almost as strange as Glen’s. He refused a polygraph, saying he
had heard they were often inaccurate and he feared a damaging
result. After repeated requests by the police, Betty’s family, and
pressure from the media to cooperate in the investigation, Neil
scheduled an interview with police at the courthouse in October.
At about 10:15 A.M., fifteen minutes past the scheduled time
for the interview, Neil was killed in a head-on collision between
his small Honda and a Mack truck. He was actually traveling
away from the courthouse when hit. e coroner’s inquest ruled
his death a suicide, though it later appeared he may have
overshot the turn and was nervously trying to get back. We may
never know for sure.
More than a year after the murder, the Wilkes-Barre police
had assembled a large amount of circumstantial evidence
pointing to Glen Wolsieffer as his wife’s killer, but they had no
hard evidence and so no proof with which to charge him. His
fingerprints and hair were found at the crime scene, but it was
his own bedroom, so that didn’t say much. Police theorized that
any ligature or bloody clothes he may have worn could have been
disposed of in a nearby river prior to Glen’s call to his brother.
eir only hope for an arrest and conviction lay in bolstering
their case with an expert opinion that the crime was committed
by someone who knew the victim personally and had staged the
crime scene.
In January of 1988, the Wilkes-Barre police asked me to
provide an analysis of the crime. After reviewing the by-then
voluminous material, I concluded rather quickly that the murder
was indeed committed by someone who knew the victim well
and staged the crime scene to cover that up. Since the police
already had a suspect, I didn’t want to generate our normal
profile, or point the finger directly at the husband, but I tried to
give the police some ammunition to help them support an arrest.
A daylight, weekend break-in in that neighborhood, into a
home with two cars parked in the driveway, was an extremely
high-risk crime against low-risk victims. A burglary scenario was
highly improbable.
It was totally inconsistent with everything we’d seen during
our years of research and case consultation throughout the world
that an intruder would enter a second-story window and
immediately head downstairs without checking rooms on the
second floor.
ere was no evidence that an intruder had brought any
weapons with him, which made an intended homicide scenario
highly improbable. Mrs. Wolsieffer was not sexually violated,
which made an intended-rape-gone-bad scenario equally
improbable. And there was no evidence of even an attempt to
take anything, which was another reason that an intendedburglary scenario was improbable. is narrowed down the
potential motives considerably.
e method of death—manual strangulation—is a personaltype crime. It is not a method a stranger is going to choose,
particularly one who has planned enough and made the effort to
break in.
e police continued methodically and meticulously building
their case. Although they were convinced as to who the murderer
was, their evidence was still circumstantial and had to hold up in
court. In the meantime, Glen Wolsieffer moved to Falls Church,
Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., and set up a dental practice
there. Late in 1989, an arrest warrant and affidavit of probable
cause was prepared, referencing my report. On November 3,
1989, thirty-eight months after the murder, a team of state,
county, and local police came down to Virginia and arrested
Wolsieffer in his dental office.
He told one of the arresting officers, “It happened too fast.
We got into it. Everything was a blur.” Later, he claimed he was
talking about the attack on him by the intruder(s), not the
murder of his wife.
ough I’d already been qualified at that time as a crime-scene
analysis expert in several states, the defense referred to me as a
“voodoo man” for the way I came up with my interpretations,
and the judge ultimately ruled that I couldn’t testify. Still, the
prosecution was able to incorporate what I’d told them.
Combined with the thorough police work, they were able to
secure a conviction for murder in the third degree.
ere were many red flags in the Wolsieffer case—the rickety
and wrongly positioned ladder, the staging of a sex crime without
any evidence of sexual assault, the inconsistency of the choking
wounds, the seeming lack of concern evidenced by not checking
on the wife and child, the fact that the child was never awakened
by any noise. But the most prominent red flag of all was the utter
illogic of the supposed intruder’s actions and behavior. Anyone
breaking into a house to commit a crime, any crime, is going to
first concern himself with the greatest threat—in this case the sixfoot two, two-hundred-pound armed man of the house—and
only secondarily with the lesser threat, the unarmed woman.
An investigator always has to have his antennae up for these
inconsistencies. Perhaps because we’ve seen so many of these
cases, we’re always acutely aware of going beyond what people say
to try to figure out what the behavior really shows.
In some ways we’re like actors preparing for a role. e actor
sees the words written on the page of the script, but what he
wants to act is the “subtext”—what the scene is really about.
One of the clearest examples of that is the 1989 murder of
Carol Stuart and the severe wounding of her husband, Charles,
in Boston. Before it was done, the case became a cause célèbre
and threatened to tear the community apart.
One night as the couple was driving home through Roxbury
from a natural-childbirth class, they were apparently attacked by
a large black man while their car was stopped at a light. He shot
Carol, thirty, and then went after twenty-nine-year-old Charles,
who sustained serious abdominal injuries requiring sixteen hours
of surgery. ough doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
worked feverishly to save Carol, she died within hours. eir
baby boy, Christopher, was delivered at the same time by
cesarean section but died within a few weeks. Charles was still
recuperating in the hospital at the time of Carol’s large and
publicized funeral.
e Boston police sprang into action, rounding up every
black man they could find who matched Charles’s description of
the attacker. Finally, he picked one out of a lineup.
But shortly thereafter, his story began to unravel. His brother
Matthew doubted there had been a robbery at all when he was
called upon to help Charles dispose of a bag containing the
supposedly stolen items. e day after the district attorney
announced he was charging Charles Stuart with the murder,
Charles committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.
e black community was understandably outraged by the
accusation he had made, just as they were six years later when
Susan Smith falsely claimed a black man had kidnapped her two
children. In the Smith case, however, the local sheriff in South
Carolina went out of his way to diffuse the problem.
Cooperating with the media and federal authorities (such as our
own agent, Jim Wright), he got to the truth in a matter of days.
It didn’t work out so efficiently in the Stuart case, though I
feel it could have had police clearly analyzed what Stuart had told
them and weighed it against what appeared to have happened at
the scene. Not everyone will go to such lengths to stage a crime
—that is, to shoot yourself that seriously, But just as in the
Wolsieffer case, if a supposed offender strikes out at the lesser
threat first—in most cases the women—there has to be a reason.
In any robbery situation, the robber will always attempt to
neutralize the most formidable foe first. If the greater threat is
not taken out first, there has to be another reason. With “Son of
Sam” David Berkowitz, he shot the women first, and in most
cases more seriously, because they were his target. e man was
just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
e problem posed by staged crimes for any of us in the law
enforcement field is that you can easily become emotionally
involved with the victims and survivors. If someone is in obvious
distress, we obviously want to believe him. If he’s a halfway
decent actor, if the crime appears legitimate on the surface,
there’s a tendency to look no further. Like doctors, we can
empathize with the victims, but we’re doing no one any favors if
we lose our objectivity.
What kind of person could have done such a thing?
As painful as the answer to that question might sometimes be,
that’s what we’re here to find out.
16
“God Wants You to Join Shari
Faye”
Shari Faye Smith, a beautiful and vivacious high school senior,
was abducted as she stopped at the mailbox in front of her
family’s house near Columbia, South Carolina. She was coming
home from a nearby shopping center where she’d met her steady
boyfriend, Richard. It was 3:38 P.M. on a warm and sunny May
31, 1985, two days before Shari was scheduled to sing the
national anthem at the Lexington High School graduation.
Only minutes later, her father, Robert, found her car at the
head of the long driveway to the house. e door was open, the
motor was running, and Shari’s purse was lying on the seat.
Panic-stricken, he immediately called the Lexington County
Sheriff’s Department.
ings like this just didn’t happen in Columbia, a proud and
peaceful community that seemed to embody the very notion of
“family values.” How could this pretty, outgoing young blonde
disappear from in front of her own home, and what kind of
person could be involved in such a thing? Sheriff Jim Metts
didn’t know. But he did sense he had a crisis on his hands. e
first thing he did was to organize what became the largest
manhunt in South Carolina history. Law enforcement officers
from state agencies and neighboring counties came in to help,
assisted by more than a thousand civilian volunteers. e second
thing Metts did was to quietly rule out as a suspect Robert
Smith, who had publicly begged for the return of his daughter.
In any instance of a disappearance or possible crime against such
a low-risk victim, spouse, parents, and close family members
always have to be considered.
e anguished Smith family waited for some word, any word,
even a ransom demand. en they got a phone call. A man with
a strangely distorted voice claimed he had Shari captive.
“So you’ll know this is not a hoax, Shari had on a black-andyellow bathing suit beneath her shirt and shorts.”
Shari’s mother, Hilda, pleaded with him, making sure he
knew Shari was diabetic and needed regular nourishment, water,
and medication. e caller made no ransom demands, saying
only, “You’ll get a letter later today.” e family and the law
officers became even more alarmed.
Metts’s next move reflected his background and training. Both
he and Undersheriff Lewis McCarty were graduates of the FBI’s
National Academy and had an excellent relationship with the
Bureau. Without hesitation, Metts called both Robert Ivey, SAC
of the Columbia, South Carolina, Field Office, and my unit in
Quantico. I was unavailable, but he got a quick and sympathetic
response from Agents Jim Wright and Ron Walker. Analyzing the
circumstances of the abduction, photos of the scene, and reports
of the telephone call, the two agents agreed they were dealing
with a sophisticated and extremely dangerous man, that Shari’s
life was very much in jeopardy. ey were afraid the young
woman could already be dead and that the subject would soon
feel the compulsion to commit another such crime. ey
surmised that what had probably happened was that the
kidnapper had seen Shari and her boyfriend, Richard, kissing at
the local shopping center and had followed her home afterward.
Her bad luck was to stop at the mailbox. Had she not stopped or
had there been cars driving by on the street, the crime would
never have happened. e sheriff’s department set up recording
equipment at the Smith home in hopes of further
communication.
en came a critical and extremely distressing piece of
evidence. In all my years in law enforcement, with all of the
horrible, almost unbelievable things I’ve seen, I have to say that
this is about the most heart wrenching. It was a two-page,
handwritten letter to the family from Shari. Written down the
left side in capital letters was the phrase “GOD IS LOVE.”
As excruciating as I still find reading this letter, it is such an
extraordinary documentation of the character and courage of this
young woman that I want to reprint it in full:
6/1/85
3:10 AM
I LOVE ya’ll
Last Will & Testament
I Love you mommy, daddy, Robert, Dawn, & Richard
and everyone else and all the other friends and relatives.
I’ll be with my father now, so please, please don’t worry!
Just remember my witty personality & great special times
we all shared together. Please don’t ever let this ruin your
lives just keep living one day at a time for Jesus. Some
good will come out of this. My thoughts will always be
with & in you! (casket closed) I love you all so damn
much. Sorry dad, I had to cuss for once! Jesus forgive me.
Richard sweetie—I really did & always will love you &
treasure our special moments. I ask one thing though.
Accept Jesus as your personal savior. My family has been
the greatest influence of my life. Sorry about the cruise
money. Some day please go in my place.
I am sorry if I ever disappointed you in any way, I only
wanted to make you proud of me because I have always
been proud of my family. Mom, dad, Robert & Dawn
there’s so much I want to say that I should have said
before now I love you!
I know y’all love me and will miss me very much, but if
y’all stick together like we always did—y’all can do it!
Please do not become hard or upset. Everything works
out for the good for those that love the Lord.
All My Love Always—
I Love Y’all
w/All My Heart!
Sharon (Shari) Smith
P.S. Nana—I love you so much. I kind of always felt like
your favorite. You were mine!
I Love you Alot
Sheriff Metts sent the pages to the crime lab at SLED—the
South Carolina Law Enforcement Division—for paper and
fingerprint analysis. Reading a copy of the letter at Quantico, we
were reasonably sure the kidnapping had turned into a murder.
Yet the closeknit Smith family, whose religious faith was so
movingly reflected in Shari’s writing, clung to hope. And on the
afternoon of June 3, Hilda Smith got a brief call asking if the
letter had arrived.
“Do you believe me now?”
“Well, I’m not really sure I believe you because I haven’t had
any word from Shari and I need to know that Shari is well.”
“You’ll know in two or three days,” the caller said ominously.
But then he called back that evening, saying that Shari was
alive and implying he would release her soon. Several of the
caller’s statements, however, told us otherwise:
“I want to tell you one other thing. Shari is now a part of me.
Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Our souls are now
one.”
When Mrs. Smith asked for assurance her daughter was well,
he said, “Shari is protected and . . . she is a part of me now and
God looks after all of us.”
Ultimately, all of the calls were traced to public phones in the
area, but in those days, “trap and trace” required keeping the
caller on the phone for about fifteen minutes, and that was never
possible. But the recording system had been set up, and copies of
the tapes were rushed to us by the FBI field office. As Wright,
Walker, and I listened to each recording, we were struck by Mrs.
Smith’s strength and control in talking with this monster. It was
clear where Shari had gotten it from.
Hoping there would be more calls, Metts asked us how he
should advise the family to deal with them. Jim Wright told him
they should try to react very much like a police negotiator
handling a hostage situation. at is, listen carefully, restate
anything of possible importance the caller said to make sure they
understood his message, try to get him to react and reveal more
about himself and his agenda. is could have several benefits.
First, it might keep the call going long enough for a successful
trap and trace. And second, it might “reassure” the caller that he
was getting a sympathetic hearing and encourage him into more
contact.
Needless to say, this degree of controlled performance is a tall
order to a horrified and grief-stricken family. But the Smiths were
amazing in their ability to pull it off, getting us important
information.
e kidnapper called the next night, this time speaking to
Shari’s twenty-one-year-old sister, Dawn. It had been four days
since Shari disappeared. He gave Dawn details about the
kidnapping, saying he had stopped his car when he saw her at the
mailbox, appeared friendly, and took a couple of photographs of
her, then forced her into his car at gunpoint. rough this and
other conversations, he veered back and forth between being
outwardly friendly, cruelly matter-of-fact, and vaguely regretful
that the whole thing “got out of hand.”
He continued his narrative: “Okay, four fifty-eight A.M.—no,
I’m sorry. Hold on a minute. ree-ten A.M., Saturday, the first of
June, uh, she handwrote what you received. Four fifty-eight,
Saturday, the first of June, we became one soul.”
“Became one soul,” Dawn repeated.
“What does that mean?” Hilda asked in the background.
“No questions now,” the caller stated.
But we knew what he meant, despite his assurance that
“blessings are near,” and that Shari would be returned the
following evening. He even told Dawn to have an ambulance
standing by.
“You will receive instructions where to find us.”
For us in Quantico, the most significant part of the taped
conversation was his comment on the time: 4:58, then going
back to 3:10 A.M. is was confirmed for us by the grim call
Hilda answered at noon the next day:
“Listen carefully. Take Highway 378 west to traffic circle.
Take Prosperity exit, go one and a half miles, turn right at sign
Moose Lodge Number 103, go one-quarter mile, turn left at
white-framed building, go to backyard, six feet beyond we’re
waiting. God chose us.” en he hung up.
Sheriff Metts played back the recording, which led him
directly to Shari Smith’s body, eighteen miles away in
neighboring Saluda County. She was wearing the yellow top and
white shorts she’d last been seen in, but the decomposition of the
body told the sheriff and medical examiner she’d been dead for
several days—since 4:58 on the morning of June 1, we were
pretty sure. e condition of the body, in fact, made it
impossible to determine the method of killing or whether Shari
had been sexually assaulted.
But Jim Wright, Ron Walker, and I were convinced her
murderer had strung the family along with hopes for her return
just long enough for critical forensic evidence to degrade. e
sticky residue of duct tape was on Shari’s face and hair, but the
tape itself had been removed—further indication of planning
and organization. ey don’t generally start out this well
organized, which indicated to us an intelligent, somewhat older
individual who was returning to the body dump site for some
type of sexual gratification. Only when the body had
decomposed to the point where a “relationship” was no longer
possible would he stop going back there.
e abduction itself, in the middle of the afternoon in a rural,
residential area, required a certain degree of finesse and
sophistication. We pegged his age at late twenties to early thirties,
and I definitely leaned toward the higher end. From the easy
cruelty of the mind games he was playing with the family, we
agreed among ourselves he’d probably been married early—
briefly and unsuccessfully. At present, he’d either be living alone
or with his parents. We expected some kind of criminal record—
assaults on women, or at least obscene phone calls. If he had any
murder priors, it would be children or young girls. Unlike a lot
of serial killers, this guy wouldn’t go after prostitutes; he’d be too
intimidated by them.
e precise directions and the self-correction about time gave
us other important insights. e directions had been carefully
thought out and written down. He had gone back to the scene
several times and had done exacting measurements. When he
called the family, he had been reading from a script! He
understood that he had to get his message out and get off the
phone as soon as possible. Several times on the phone, he’d lost
his place when interrupted and had to begin again. Whoever he
was, he was rigid and orderly, meticulous and obsessively neat.
He would take notes compulsively and keep lists on everything,
and if he lost his place in his notes, he would lose his train of
thought as well. We knew he had to have driven to and from the
abduction site in front of Shari’s home. I guessed from the
personality that his car would be clean and well maintained,
three years old or newer. All in all, a mixed presentation of
someone whose outward arrogance and contempt for the whole
stupid world out there conflicted continually with deep-seated
insecurity and feelings of inadequacy.
In this type of case, the crime scene becomes psychologically
part of the killing. e geography of the crime also suggested a
local man, probably someone who had lived in the area for most
or all of his life. For the things he wanted to do with Shari, then
with her body, he would need time alone in a secluded area
where he knew he would not be disturbed. Only a local would
know where those areas would be.
e Signal Analysis Unit of the FBI Engineering Section told
us the caller’s voice distortion was accomplished by something
they called a variable speed control device. Teletype requests for
assistance on tracking down manufacturers and retail outlets
went out to field offices throughout the country. We decided
from this report that the UNSUB had some sort of background
in electronics, and possible employment in the home
construction or remodeling field.
e next day, as Bob Smith was making final arrangements
with the funeral home for the burial of his younger daughter, the
killer called again, this time collect, and demanded to speak to
Dawn. He said he would be turning himself in the following
morning, and that the photographs he had taken of Shari at the
mailbox were in the mail to the Smith family. He self-pityingly
asked Dawn for the family’s forgiveness and prayers. He also
implied that instead of turning himself in, he was considering
committing suicide, lamenting again how “this thing got out of
hand and all I wanted to do was make love to Dawn. I’ve been
watching her for a couple of—” “To who?” Dawn interrupted.
“To—I’m sorry, to Shari,” he corrected himself. “And I
watched her a couple of weeks, and, uh, it just got out of hand.”
is was the first of several instances in which he would
confuse the two sisters, not a difficult thing to do since both girls
were pretty, outgoing blondes who looked strikingly alike.
Dawn’s picture had been in the newspaper and on television, and
whatever appealed to him about Shari probably applied to Dawn
as well. Listening to the recordings, it was impossible not to be
sickened by this sadistic and monumentally self-indulgent
performance. But I knew at that point—as cold and calculating
as it may sound—that Dawn could serve as bait to catch the
killer.
In a call the same day to a local television anchorman, Charlie
Keyes, he reiterated his intention to turn himself in, saying he
wanted the popular Keyes to serve as a “medium” and promising
him an exclusive interview. Keyes listened, but wisely remained
detached and promised the caller nothing.
First of all, I told Lewis McCarty on the phone, he has no
intention of surrendering. He isn’t going to kill himself, either.
He told Dawn he was a “family friend,” and he’s just
psychopathic enough to want the Smiths to understand and
empathize with him. We did not believe he knew the family; this
was just part of his fantasy of being close to and loved by Shari.
He is totally narcissistic, and the longer this goes on, I counseled
McCarty, the more reaction he gets from the family, the more
comfortable and into the whole experience he becomes. And he
will kill again, someone very much like Shari if he can find
someone like that, another victim of opportunity if he can’t. e
underlying theme of everything he does is power, manipulation,
domination, and control.
On the evening of the day of Shari’s funeral, he called again
and spoke to Dawn. In a particularly perverse action, he had the
operator tell Dawn it was a collect call from Shari. Once again he
claimed he was going to turn himself in, then went into a
horribly casual and banal description of her death:
“So, from about two in the morning from the time she
actually knew until she died at four fifty-eight, we talked a lot
and everything and she picked the time. She said she was ready
to depart, God was ready to accept her as an angel.”
He described having sex with her and said that he’d given her
a choice of death—shooting, drug overdose, or suffocation. He
said she’d chosen the last one and he’d suffocated her with duct
tape over her nose and mouth.
“Why did you have to kill her?” Dawn tearfully demanded.
“It got out of hand. I got scared because, ah, only God knows,
Dawn. I don’t know why, God forgive me for this. I hope and I
got to straighten it out or he’ll send me to hell and I’ll be there
the rest of my life, but I’m not going to be in prison or the
electric chair.”
Both Dawn and her mother pleaded with the caller to turn
himself over to God, rather than kill himself. In my unit, we
were pretty damn sure he had no intention of doing either.
Two weeks to the day after Shari Smith was kidnapped, Debra
May Helmick was abducted from the yard in front of her
parents’ trailer home in Richland County, twenty-four miles
from the Smith home. Her father was inside the house at the
time, just twenty feet away. A neighbor saw someone pull up in a
car, get out and speak with Debra, then suddenly grab her, yank
her into the car, and speed off. e neighbor and Mr. Helmick
immediately took off after the car, but lost it. Like Shari, Debra
was a pretty, blue-eyed blonde. Unlike Shari, she was only nine
years old.
Sheriff Metts launched another intense effort to find her.
Meanwhile, things were starting to get to me. When you do the
kind of work my unit and I do for a living, you have to maintain
some degree of distance and objectivity from the case materials
and subject matter. Otherwise, you go crazy, And as difficult as
that had been in the Smith case so far, this latest horrible
development made that all but impossible. Little Debra Helmick
was only nine—the same age as my daughter Erika, also a blueeyed blonde. My second girl, Lauren, was just barely five. Aside
from the horrible, gnawing sensation of, “is could have been
my child,” there is that understandable feeling of wanting to
handcuff your kids to your wrist and never let them out of your
sight. When you see what I’ve seen, not actually doing that—
giving your children the space and freedom they need to live—is
a constant emotional struggle.
Despite the difference in the Smith and Helmick girls’ ages,
the timing, circumstances, and modus operandi indicated we
were likely dealing with the same offender. I know that both the
sheriff’s department and my unit agreed on that. So with somber
acceptance of the probability that they now officially had a serial
killer on their hands, Lewis McCarty flew up to Quantico and
brought all of the case materials with him.
Walker and Wright reviewed all the decisions that had led to
the profile and all of the advice they had given. With the added
information from the new crime, they saw no reason to change
their evaluation.
Despite the voice disguise, our UNSUB was almost assuredly
white. ese were both sexually based crimes perpetrated by an
insecure and inadequate adult male. Both victims were white,
and we had found it unusual to see this kind of crime cross racial
lines. He would be outwardly shy and polite, have a poor selfimage, and would probably be heavyset or overweight, not
attractive to women. We told McCarty we would expect our man
to be displaying even more compulsive behavior now. Close
associates would notice some weight loss, he might be drinking
heavily, not shaving regularly, and he would be eager to talk
about the murder. Someone this meticulous would be following
television reports avidly and collecting newspaper clippings. He
would also collect pornography, with a particular emphasis on
bondage and sadomasochism. He would now be thoroughly
enjoying his celebrity, his sense of power over his victims and the
community, his ability to manipulate the grieving Smith family.
As I’d feared, when he couldn’t get a victim who matched his
fantasies and desires, he went for the most vulnerable victim of
opportunity, Because of Shari’s age, she had at least been
reasonably approachable. But if he really thought about it, we
didn’t think our guy would feel particularly good about Debra
Helmick, so we didn’t expect any phone calls to her family.
McCarty went home with a twenty-two-point list of
conclusions and characteristics about the subject. When he got
back, he said he told Metts, “I know the man. Now all we have
to find out is his name.
As gratifying as his faith in us was, things are seldom so
simple. Combined state law enforcement agencies and the
Columbia Field Office combed the area, looking for any trace of
Debra. But there was no communication, no demands, no fresh
evidence. Up in Quantico, we waited for word, trying to prepare
ourselves for whatever happened. e empathy you feel for the
family of a missing child is almost unbearable. At both SAC
Ivey’s and Sheriff Metts’s request, I packed my bags and flew
down to Columbia to give on-scene assistance in what promised
to be a breaking case. I brought Ron Walker with me. It was the
first trip we’d made together since he and Blaine McIlwain had
saved my life in Seattle.
Lew McCarty met us at the airport, and we wasted no time,
familiarizing ourselves with the various scenes. McCarty drove us
to each of the abduction sites. It was hot and humid, even by our
Virginia standards. ere were no overt signs of struggle in front
of either home. e Smith body dump site was just that—the
murder had clearly taken place elsewhere. But seeing the
locations, I was more convinced than ever that our UNSUB had
to know the area intimately, and even though several of the calls
to the Smiths had been long distance, he had to be a local.
ere was a meeting at the sheriff’s department for the key
people on the case. Sheriff Metts had a large and impressive office
—about thirty feet long with twelve-foot-high ceilings, and walls
completely covered with plaques and certificates and
memorabilia; everything he’d ever done in his life was up on
those walls, from testimonials for solving murders to appreciation
from the Girl Scouts. He sat behind his massive desk with the
rest of us—Ron and me, Bob Ivey, and Lew McCarty—in a
semicircle around him. “He’s stopped calling the Smiths,” Metts
lamented.
“I’ll get him to call again,” I said.
I told them the profile should provide a valuable aid in the
police investigation, but I thought we also needed to try to force
him quickly into the open and explained some of the proactive
techniques I had in mind. I asked if there was a local newspaper
reporter who’d provide coverage of the murder. It wasn’t a
question of censorship or giving him or her direct orders what to
write, but it had to be someone sympathetic with what we were
trying to accomplish.
Metts suggested a reporter from a local newspaper. She agreed
to come to the office, where Ron and I tried to educate her about
the criminal personality and how we thought this individual
would react.
He would be closely following the press, we told her,
especially any story featuring Dawn. We knew from our research
that these types often went back to the crime scenes or grave sites
of their victims. I told her that with some press coverage I
thought we could entice him into the open and trap him. At the
very least, we hoped we could get him to start calling again. I
told her we had had close cooperation from members of the press
in the Tylenol poisonings, and that had served as a model of the
way we wanted things to be.
McCarty then took me to meet the Smiths and explain what I
wanted them to do. What I had in mind, essentially, was using
Dawn to bait our trap. Robert Smith was extremely nervous
about this, not wanting to place his remaining daughter in
jeopardy. As concerned as I was about this ploy, I felt it
represented our best shot and tried to reassure Mr. Smith that
Shari’s killer was a coward and would not come after Dawn
amidst such intense publicity and scrutiny. And having studied
the phone recordings, I was convinced Dawn was smart and
courageous enough to do what I wanted her to.
Dawn took me into Shari’s room, which they had left intact
from the last time she was there. As you might expect, this is
common among families who’ve lost a child suddenly and
tragically, e first thing that struck me was Shari’s collection of
stuffed koala bears—all shapes and sizes and colors. Dawn said
the collection was important to Shari, and all her friends knew
that.
I spent a long time in the room, trying to get a feel for Shari
as she must have been. Her killer was definitely catchable. We
just had to make the right choices. After some time, I picked up
a tiny koala, the kind whose arms open and close as you squeeze
its shoulders. I explained to the family that in a few days—just
enough time to get full newspaper coverage—we would hold a
memorial service at Shari’s grave at Lexington Memorial
Cemetery, during which Dawn would attach the stuffed animal
to a bouquet of flowers. I thought we had a good chance of
drawing the killer to the service, and an even better chance of
having him return to the scene after the ceremony was over to
take the koala as a tangible souvenir of Shari.
e reporter’s paper sent a photographer to the service. Since
there was no gravestone yet, we’d had a white wooden lectern
constructed with Shari’s picture laminated to the front. In turn,
the family members stood at the grave and offered prayers for
Shari and Debra. en Dawn held up Shari’s little koala and
attached it by the arms to the stem of a rose from one of the
bouquets that had been sent to the cemetery. Altogether, it was
an extremely emotional and moving experience. While the
Smiths spoke and a group of photographers took pictures for the
local press, Metts’s men quietly took down license numbers of all
cars passing by. e one thing that bothered me was that the
grave site was so close to the road. I thought such an unsecluded
spot might intimidate the perpetrator from coming up close and
also allow him to see what he wanted from the road. But we
could do nothing about that.
Pictures appeared in the paper the next day. Shari’s killer
didn’t come for the koala bear that night as we’d hoped. I think
the proximity to the road did scare him. But he did call again.
Shortly after midnight, Dawn answered the phone for another
collect call “from Shari Faye Smith.” After establishing that it
was, in fact, Dawn on the line, and making sure that “you know
this isn’t a hoax, correct?” he made his most chilling
pronouncement thus far:
“Okay, you know, God wants you to join Shari Faye. It’s just a
matter of time. is month, next month, this year, next year. You
can’t be protected all the time.” en he asked her if she had
heard about Debra May Helmick.
“Uh, no.”
“e ten-year-old? H-E-L-M-I-C-K?”
“Uh, Richland County?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh—huh.”
“Okay, listen carefully. Go One north . . . well, One west,
turn left at Peach Festival Road or Bill’s Grill, go three and a half
miles through Gilbert, turn right, last dirt road before you come
to stop sign at Two Notch Road, go through chain and No
Trespassing sign, go fifty yards, and to the left, go ten yards.
Debra May is waiting. God forgive us all.”
He was getting bolder and cockier, no longer using the voicealtering device. Despite the overt threat against her life, Dawn
did her best to hold him on the line as long as possible,
brilliantly keeping her wits about her and demanding the
pictures of her sister he’d promised were coming but which had
never arrived.
“Apparently the FBI must have them,” he said defensively,
acknowledging his understanding of our role in the case.
“No, sir,” Dawn shot back, “because when they have
something, we get it, too, you know. Are you going to send
them?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied noncommittally.
“I think you’re jerking me around because you said they were
coming and they’re not here.”
We were getting closer, but the responsibility of having placed
Dawn in more danger was weighing heavily on me. While Ron
and I helped the local authorities, the technicians at the SLED
laboratories in Columbia were subjecting their only piece of hard
evidence—Shari’s last will and testament—to every imaginable
test. It had been written on lined paper from a legal pad, which
gave one analyst an idea.
Using a device called an Esta machine, which can detect
almost microscopically slight impressions made on the paper
from sheets that had been higher up in the pad, he detected a
partial grocery list and what seemed to be a string of numbers.
Eventually, he was able to make out nine numerals of a tennumber sequence: 205-837-13 8.
e area code for Alabama is 205, and 837 is a Huntsville
exchange. Working with Southern Bell’s Security Division, SLED
went through all ten possible phone numbers in Huntsville, then
cross-checked to see if any of them related back to the ColumbiaLexington County region. One of them had received multiple
calls from a residence just fifteen miles from the Smith home,
several weeks before Shari was kidnapped. is was the biggest
lead yet. According to municipal records, the house belonged to a
middle-aged couple, Ellis and Sharon Sheppard.
Armed with this information, McCarty took several deputies
and raced to the Sheppard home. Its occupants were cordial and
friendly, but other than that the fifty-odd-year-old Ellis was an
electrician, nothing about him fit our profile. e Sheppards had
been happily married for many years and had none of the
background we had predicted in the killer. ey acknowledged
making the calls to Huntsville, where their son was stationed in
the Army, but said they had been out of town when both
horrible murders had been committed. After such a promising
forensic lead, it was a disappointing outcome.
But McCarty had spent considerable time working with us
and had faith that the profile was accurate. He described it to the
Sheppards, then asked them if they knew anyone who might fit
it.
ey looked at each other in a moment of instant recognition.
at would be Larry Gene Bell, they agreed.
Under McCarty’s careful questioning, they proceeded to tell
the undersheriff all about Bell. He was in his early thirties—
divorced with a son who lived with his ex-wife, shy and heavyset,
he worked for Ellis doing electrical wiring at various houses and
other odd jobs. Meticulous and organized, he had house-sat for
them the six weeks they’d been away, after which he’d gone back
to live with his parents, with whom he’d been staying. Sharon
Sheppard recalled writing their son’s phone number on a writing
pad for Gene, as they called him, in case anything came up with
the house while Gene was there. And now that they thought
about it, when he’d picked them up at the airport, all he’d
wanted to talk about was the kidnapping and murder of the
Smith girl. ey had been surprised by his appearance when they
saw him: he had lost weight, was unshaven, and seemed highly
agitated.
McCarty asked Mr. Sheppard if he had a gun. He kept a
loaded .38 pistol at home for protection, Ellis replied. McCarty
asked to see it, and Ellis obligingly took him to where he kept the
weapon. But it wasn’t there. e two men looked all over the
house and finally found it—under the mattress of the bed Gene
had slept on. It had been fired and was currently jammed. Also
under the mattress was a copy of Hustler magazine, showing a
beautiful blonde in bondage in a crucified position. And when
McCarty played a portion of one of the telephone calls to Dawn,
Ellis was sure it was Larry Gene Bell’s voice he was listening to:
“No doubt about it.”
At about two A.M., Ron Walker knocked on my door and got
me out of bed. He’d just gotten a call from McCarty, who told us
about Larry Gene Bell and asked us to come to the office right
away. We all matched up the evidence and the profile. It was
uncanny how accurately he fit. is looked like a bull’s-eye.
Sheriff’s photos showed a car registered to Bell on the road near
the grave site, but the driver had not gotten out.
Metts planned to have Bell arrested as he left for work in the
morning and wanted advice from me on how to conduct the
interrogation. Behind the office was a trailer the department had
obtained in a drug raid that they used as an auxiliary office. At
my suggestion, they quickly turned it into a “task force”
headquarters for the case. ey put case photographs and maps
of the crime scenes on the walls and stacked the desks high with
folders and case materials. I told them to man the trailer with
busy-looking cops to give the impression of a tremendous
amount of evidence amassed against the killer.
Getting a confession would be difficult, we warned them.
South Carolina was a capital punishment state, and at the very
least, the guy would expect a long prison term doing hard time as
a child molester and killer—not exactly the optimum
circumstances for someone who values his life and bodily
integrity. e best hope, I felt, would be some face-saving
scenario—either trying to put some of the blame on the victims
themselves, as offensive as that would be to the interrogators, or
getting him to explain himself away with an insanity defense.
Accused people with no other way out often jump at this, even
though, statistically, juries rarely go for it.
Sheriff’s deputies arrested Larry Gene Bell early in the
morning as he left his parents’ home for work. Jim Metts
carefully watched his face as he was brought into the “task force”
trailer. “It was like a whitewash came over his face,” the sheriff
reported. “It put him in the proper psychological perspective.”
He was Mirandized and waived his rights, agreeing to talk to the
investigators.
e officers went at him most of the day while Ron and I
waited in Metts’s office, receiving bulletins on the progress and
coaching them on what to do next. Meanwhile, deputies armed
with a search warrant were examining Bell’s home. As we could
have predicted, his shoes were lined up perfectly under his bed,
his desk was meticulously arranged, even the tools in the trunk of
his three-year-old, well-maintained car were arranged just so. On
his desk they found directions to his parents’ house written out
in precisely the same manner as the directions he’d given to the
Smith and Helmick body dump sites. ey found more bondage
and S&M pornography as we’d expected. Technicians found
hairs on his bed that would match up with Shari’s, and the
commemorative stamp used to mail her last will and testament
matched a sheet in his desk drawer. And when his photograph
was subsequently shown on the TV news, the witness to Debra
Helmick’s abduction recognized him immediately.
His background quickly emerged. As we’d predicted, he had
been involved in various sexual incidents since childhood, which
had finally gotten out of hand when he was twenty-six and tried
to force a nineteen-year-old married woman into his car at
knifepoint. To avoid going to prison, he had agreed to
psychiatric counseling, but quit after two sessions. Five months
later he tried to force a college girl into his car at gunpoint. He
received a five-year prison term and was paroled after twenty-one
months. While on probation, he made more than eighty obscene
phone calls to a ten-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty and only got
more probation.
But back at the trailer, Bell wasn’t talking. He denied any
involvement with the crimes, admitting only that he had been
interested in them. Even after they played the tapes for him, he
was unresponsive. After about six hours, he said he wanted to
talk to Sheriff Metts personally. Metts came in and again advised
him of his rights, but he wouldn’t confess to anything.
So, late in the afternoon, Ron and I are still in the sheriff’s
office when Metts and District Attorney Don Meyers (called the
county solicitor in South Carolina) come in with Bell. He’s fat
and soft and reminds me of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Ron and I
are both surprised, and Meyers says to Bell in his Carolina
accent, “Do you know who these boys are? ese boys are from
the F-B-I. You know, they did a profile and it fits you right down
to a tee! Now these boys want to talk to you for a little bit.” ey
put him on this white sofa against the wall, then they both go
out, leaving us alone with Bell.
I’m sitting on the edge of the coffee table directly in front of
Bell. Ron is standing behind me. I’m still wearing what I’d left
the motel in long before daybreak, which is a white shirt and
practically matching white trousers. I call it my Harry Belafonte
outfit, but in this context, in the white room with the white sofa,
I look kind of clinical; almost otherworldly.
I start giving Bell some of the background on our serial-killer
study and make it clear to him that from our research, I
understand perfectly the motivation of the individual responsible
for these homicides. I tell him he may have been denying the
crimes all day because he’s trying to repress thoughts he doesn’t
feel good about.
I say, “Going into the penitentiaries and interviewing all these
subjects, one of the things we’ve found is that the truth almost
never gets out about the background of the person. And
generally when a crime like this happens, it’s like a nightmare to
the person who commits it. ey’re going through so many
precipitating stressors in their life—financial problems, marital
problems, or problems with a girlfriend.” And as I’m saying this,
he’s nodding as if he’s got all these problems.
en I say, “e problem for us, Larry, is that when you go to
court, your attorney probably isn’t going to want you to take the
stand, and you’ll never have the opportunity to explain yourself.
All they’ll know about you is the bad side of you, nothing good
about you, just that you’re a coldblooded killer. And as I say,
we’ve found that very often when people do this kind of thing, it
is like a nightmare, and when they wake up the next morning,
they can’t believe they’ve actually committed this crime.
All the time I’m talking, Bell is still nodding his head in
agreement.
I don’t ask him outright at that point if he did the murders,
because I know if I phrase it that way, I’ll get a denial. So I lean
in close and say to him, “When did you first start feeling bad
about the crime, Larry?”
And he says, “When I saw a photograph and read a newspaper
article about the family praying in the cemetery.”
en I say, “Larry, as you’re sitting here now, did you do this
thing? Could you have done it?” In this type of setting, we try to
stay away from accusatory or inflammatory words like kill, crime,
and murder.
He looks up at me with tears in his eyes and says, “All I know
is that the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done this,
but the bad Larry Gene Bell could have.”
I knew that that was as close as we would come to a
confession. But Don Meyers wanted us to try one more thing,
and I agreed with him. He thought if Bell were confronted faceto-face by Shari’s mother and sister, we might get an
instantaneous reaction from him.
Hilda and Dawn agree to this, and I prepare them for what I
want them to say and how I want them to act. So then we’re in
Metts’s office. He’s sitting behind his huge desk, Ron Walker and
I are on either side of the room, forming a triangle. ey bring in
Bell and sit him in the middle, facing the door. en they bring
in Hilda and Dawn and tell Bell to say something. He keeps his
head down, as if he can’t bring himself to look at them.
But as I’ve instructed her, Dawn looks him straight in the eye
and says, “It’s you! I know it’s you. I recognize your voice.”
He doesn’t deny it, but neither does he admit it. He starts
giving them back all the stuff I’d given him to get him to talk. He
says the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done it and all
the other bullshit. I’m still hoping he’ll seize on the possibility of
an insanity defense and spill his guts out to them.
is goes on awhile. Mrs. Smith keeps asking him questions,
trying to bring him out. Inside, I’m sure everyone is sick to their
stomachs having to listen to this.
en suddenly, I have this flash. I wonder if Dawn or Hilda is
armed. Were they checked out to see if they had a gun, because I
don’t remember anyone doing this. So the whole time now, I’m
sitting on the edge of my seat, practically bouncing on the balls
of my feet, ready to grab a gun and disarm either of them if one
starts reaching into a purse. I know what I’d want to do in a
situation like this if it were my child, and a lot of other parents
feel the same way. is is the perfect opportunity to kill this guy,
and no jury in the world would convict them.
Fortunately, Dawn and Hilda had not tried to smuggle in a
weapon. ey had more restraint and faith in the system than I
might have had, but Ron checked afterward, and they hadn’t
been searched.
•••
Larry Gene Bell stood trial for the murder of Shari Faye Smith
late the following January. Because of the huge amount of
publicity, the venue was changed to Berkeley County, near
Charleston. Don Meyers asked me to testify as an expert witness
about the profile and how it was developed, and about my
interrogation of the defendant.
Bell didn’t take the stand and never again admitted any blame.
What he’d said to me in Sheriff Metts’s office was the closest he
ever came. He spent most of the trial taking copious, compulsive
notes on the same kind of legal pad that Shari Smith’s last will
and testament had been written on. Yet the state’s case was pretty
convincing. After almost a month of testimony, the jury needed
only forty-seven minutes to return the verdict of guilty of
kidnapping and first-degree murder. Four days later, upon the
further deliberation and recommendation of the jury, he was
sentenced to death by electrocution. He was tried separately for
the kidnapping and murder of Debra May Helmick. at jury
didn’t need much longer to come up with the same verdict and
punishment.
From my perspective, the Larry Gene Bell case was an
example of law enforcement at its best. ere was tremendous
cooperation between many county, state, and federal agencies;
sensitive and energetic local leadership; two heroic families; and a
perfect symbiosis between profiling and crime analysis and
traditional police and forensic techniques. Working together, all
of these factors stopped an increasingly dangerous serial killer
early in his potential career. I’d like it to be a model for future
investigations.
Dawn Smith went on to do impressive things with her life.
e year after the trial, she won the title of Miss South Carolina
and was a runner-up in the Miss America pageant. She married
and pursued her musical ambitions and became a country and
gospel singer. I see her on television from time to time.
As of this writing, Larry Gene Bell remains on death row at
the South Carolina Central Correctional Facility where he keeps
his cell remarkably neat and orderly. Police believe he is
responsible for a number of other murders of girls and young
women in both North and South Carolina. As far as I’m
concerned, based on my research and experience, there is no
possibility of rehabilitating this type of individual. If he is ever let
out, he will kill again. And for those who argue that such a long
stay on death row constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, I
might agree with them up to a point. Delaying imposition of the
ultimate penalty is cruel and unusual—to the Smith and
Helmick families, the many who knew and loved these two girls,
and all the rest of us who want to see justice done.
17
Anyone Can Be a Victim
On June 1, 1989, a fisherman in his boat spotted three “floaters”
in Florida’s Tampa Bay. He contacted the Coast Guard and the
St. Petersburg police, who removed the badly decomposed bodies
from the water. ey were all female, hog-tied with a
combination of yellow plastic rope and regular white rope. All
three were weighted down with fifty-pound cinder blocks tied
around the neck. ese blocks were of a two-hole variety rather
than the more common three-hole type. Silver duct tape covered
the mouths and, from residue, appeared to have covered the eyes
when they were dropped in the water, and all three were wearing
T-shirts and bathing-suit tops. e suit bottoms were missing,
suggesting some sexual nature to the crime, though the state of
the bodies in the water didn’t allow for any forensic
determination of sexual assault.
From a car found near the shore, the three bodies were
identified as Joan Rogers, thirty-eight, and her two daughters,
seventeen-year-old Michelle and fifteen-year-old Christie. ey
lived on a farm in Ohio, and this was their first real vacation.
ey had already been to Disney World and were now staying at
the Day’s Inn in St. Petersburg before returning home. Mr.
Rogers didn’t feel he could spare the time away from the farm
and hadn’t accompanied his wife and daughters.
Examination of the dead women’s stomach contents,
correlated with interviews from restaurant workers at the Day’s
Inn, fixed the time of death to have been about forty-eight hours
previously. e only tangible piece of forensic evidence was a
scribbled note found in the car giving directions from the Day’s
Inn to the spot where the car was found. On the other side were
directions and a drawn map from Dale Mabry, a busy
commercial street in St. Petersburg, to the hotel.
e case instantly became a major news event, involving the
police departments of St. Petersburg and Tampa and the
Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department. Fear among the
public was high. If these three innocent tourists from Ohio can
be killed like this, everyone reasoned, then anyone can be a
victim.
Police tried to follow up on the note, matching the
handwriting against that of hotel employees and people in shops
and offices around the area on Dale Mabry where the directions
began. But they came up with nothing. e brutal, sexual nature
of the killings, however, was alarming and indicative. e
Hillsborough Sheriff’s Office contacted the FBI’s Tampa Field
Office, saying, “We may have a serial case.” Still, the combined
work of the three police jurisdictions and the FBI produced no
significant progress.
Jana Monroe was an agent in the Tampa Field Office. Before
coming to the Bureau, she’d been a police officer and then a
homicide detective in California. In September 1990, after Jim
Wright and I interviewed her for an opening in the unit, we
requested her reassignment to Quantico. Jana had been a profile
coordinator in the field office, and once she joined the unit,
Rogers became one of the first cases she did for us.
Representatives of the St. Pete police flew up to Quantico and
presented the case to Jana, Larry Ankrom, Steve Etter, Bill
Hagmaier, and Steve Mardigian. ey then developed a profile,
which described a white man in his mid-thirties to mid-forties;
in a blue-collar, home maintenance-type occupation; poorly
educated; with a history of sexual and physical assault and
precipitating stressors immediately prior to the murder. As soon
as the heat was off the investigation, he would have left the area,
but like John Prante in the Karla Brown case, he might later have
returned.
e agents were confident of the profile, but it didn’t lead to
an arrest. Little progress was being made. ey needed a more
proactive approach, so Jana went on Unsolved Mysteries, one of
the nationally syndicated television programs that often have
good results in locating and identifying UN-SUBs. ousands of
leads were generated after Jana’s appearance and description of
the crime, but still, none of them panned out.
If one thing doesn’t work, I always tell my people, you try
something else, even if it’s never been tried before. And that’s
what Jana did. e note of scribbled directions seemed to be the
one item linking the victims to the killer, but so far it hadn’t been
very useful. Since the case was well known in the Tampa-St. Pete
community, she came up with the idea of blowing it up on
billboards to see if anyone recognized the handwriting. It’s
accepted in law enforcement circles that most people will not
recognize handwriting outside their immediate family and close
friends, but Jana figured someone might well come forward,
particularly if the subject had been abusive and a spouse or
partner was looking for a reason to turn him in.
Several local businessmen donated billboard space, and the
note was reproduced for all to see. Within a couple of days, three
separate individuals who had never met each other called the
police and identified the handwriting as belonging to Oba
Chandler, a white male in his mid-forties. An unlicensed
aluminum-siding installer, he had been sued by each of these
three people when their newly installed siding had come loose
after the first heavy rain. ey were so sure of the ID because
each had a handwritten copy of his legal response to their
charges.
In addition to the age and profession, he fit the profile in
other key areas. He had a previous record of property crimes,
assault and battery, and sexual assault. He had moved out of the
immediate area after the heat was off, though he hadn’t felt a
need to leave the region. e precipitating stressor was that his
current wife had just delivered a baby he didn’t want.
And, as often happens once you can do something to break a
case open, another victim came forward after hearing the details
of the murder. A woman and her girlfriend had met a man
matching Chandler’s description who wanted them to come out
with him on his boat in Tampa Bay. e girlfriend had a bad
feeling about the whole thing and had refused, so this woman
went alone.
When they were out in the middle of the bay, he tried to rape
her. When she tried to resist, he’d warned her, “Don’t scream or
I’m going to put duct tape on your mouth, tie you to a cinder
block, and drown you!”
Oba Chandler was arrested, tried, and found guilty of the
first-degree murder of Joan, Michelle, and Christie Rogers. He
was sentenced to death.
His victims were ordinary, trusting people whose selection was
almost random. Sometimes the selection is completely random,
proving the frightening assertion that anyone can be a victim.
And in situations like these, as in the Rogers case, proactive
techniques become all-important.
•••
In late 1982, people were dying suddenly and mysteriously in the
Chicago area. Before long, Chicago police came up with a
connection between the deaths and isolated the cause: the
victims had all taken Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. Once
the capsule broke down in the stomach, death followed quickly.
Ed Hagarty, the Chicago SAC, asked me to come into the
investigation. I’d never worked a product-tampering case, but as I
thought about it, I figured that much of what I’d learned from
the prison interviews and experience with a variety of other types
of offenders should apply here, too. In FBI code, the case became
known as “Tymurs.”
e primary problem facing the investigators was the random
nature of the poisonings. Since the offender neither targeted a
specific victim nor was present at the crime scene, the type of
analysis we normally did wouldn’t reveal anything directly.
e homicides were apparently motiveless—that is, they
weren’t motivated by any of the traditional, recognizable motives
such as love, jealousy, greed, or revenge. e poisoner could be
targeting the manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, any of the stores
selling the product, one or more of the victims, or society in
general.
I saw these poisonings as the same type of act as a random
bombing or throwing rocks down from an overpass onto cars
below. In all of these crimes, the offender never sees the face of
his victim. I pictured this offender—much like David Berkowitz
shooting into darkened cars—as more concerned with acting out
his anger than with targeting a particular type of victim. If this
type of subject were ever made to see the faces of his victims, he
might have second thoughts or show some remorse.
Given the ready comparison with other random, cowardly
crimes, I felt I had an understanding of what the UNSUB would
be like. Even though we were dealing with a different type of
crime, in many ways the profile was a familiar one. Our research
had shown us that subjects who kill indiscriminately without
seeking publicity tend to be motivated primarily by anger. I
believed this guy would have periods of severe depression and
would be an inadequate, hopeless type who would have
experienced failure throughout his life in school, jobs,
relationships.
Statistically, the subject would probably fit the assassin mold
—a white male in his late twenties to early thirties, a nocturnal
loner. He would have gone to victims’ homes or visited grave
sites, possibly leaving something significant there. I expected him
to be employed in some position as close to power and authority
as he could come, such as ambulance driver, security guard, store
detective, or auxiliary policeman. And he would probably have
some military experience, either Army or Marines.
I thought he’d have had psychiatric treatment in the past and
have been on prescription drugs to control his problem. His car
would be at least five years old, not well maintained but
representing strength and power, such as the Ford model favored
by police departments. Near the time of the first poisoning—
around September 28 or 29—he would have experienced a
precipitating stressor for which he may have blamed society in
general, fueling his anger. And once the case became public, he
would discuss it with whoever would listen to him in bars,
drugstores, and with police. e power these crimes represented
was a major boost for his ego, which indicated he might keep a
diary or scrapbook of media coverage.
I told the police it was also likely he’d written to people in
positions of power—the president, the director of the FBI, the
governor, the mayor—to complain about perceived wrongs
against him. In early letters, he would have signed his name. As
time passed without what he considered an appropriate response
from anyone, he grew angry over being ignored. ese random
killings could be his way of getting back at all those who didn’t
take him seriously.
Finally, I warned against reading too much into the selection
of Tylenol as the means of poisoning. is was a crude, sloppy
operation. Tylenol was a common drug and the capsules were
easy to open. It was at least as likely that he liked the packaging
as that he had any particular grudge against Johnson & Johnson.
As with serial bombers, arsonists, and other such cases, in a
large city like Chicago many people would fit the general profile.
erefore, like the Rogers case, it was more important to focus
on proactive techniques. e police had to keep pressure on the
subject and not let him cope. One of the ways they could do this
was by issuing only positive statements. At the same time, I
warned them not to provoke him by calling him a madman,
which, unfortunately, was already happening.
More important than that, though, would be to encourage the
press to print articles humanizing the victims, since the very
nature of the crime tended to dehumanize them in the UNSUB’s
mind. In particular, I thought he might begin to feel some guilt
if forced to confront the human face of a twelve-year-old girl
who had died, and we might be able to get to him through that.
As a variation on what we’d tried in Atlanta and in the Shari
Smith case, I suggested holding a nighttime vigil at the grave sites
of some of the victims, which I thought the UNSUB might
attend. Recognizing that the subject probably didn’t feel good
about himself, I also advised giving heavy press to anniversaries
associated with the crimes.
I thought we could encourage him to visit specific stores in
the way we’d been able to “direct” bank robbers in Milwaukee
and Detroit to hold up specific bank branches where we were
waiting for them. For example, the police could leak information
about steps being taken to protect customers at one particular
store. I thought the guy might feel compelled to visit that store
to see firsthand the effects of his actions. A variation on that
would be to publish an article about an arrogant store manager
who would publicly state how confident he was in his
establishment’s security and that it would be impossible for the
Tylenol poisoner to tamper with any product on his shelves.
Another version of this ploy would be to have police and FBI
agents respond to a “hot tip” at a particular store, with attendant
publicity, is would turn out to be a false alarm. But the police
official would then state for the cameras that his department’s
intelligence capability is so efficient that the unknown subject
decided against planting the poisoned Tylenol. is should
provide him with an indirect challenge he might find difficult to
pass up.
We could put forth a bleeding-heart psychiatrist who would
give an interview professing great support for the subject,
categorizing him as a victim of society and thereby providing him
with a face-saving scenario. e subject would be expected to call
or drive by the doctor’s office, where we’d be ready to trap and
trace.
And I thought that if officials set up a volunteer civilian task
force to help the police with all the phoned-in tips, the subject
would likely volunteer to help man it. Had we been able to set
up something like that in Atlanta, I think we would have seen
Wayne Williams. Ted Bundy, in his time, had volunteered at a
Seattle rape crisis center.
ere is always some squeamishness on the part of law
enforcement about cooperating too closely with—or using—the
media. is has come up a number of times in my career. Back in
the early 1980s, when the profiling program was relatively new, I
was called up to headquarters to meet with the Criminal
Investigation Division and Bureau legal counsel to explain some
of my proactive techniques.
“John, you don’t lie to the press, do you?”
I gave them a recent example of how a successful proactive
approach to the media had worked. In San Diego, a young
woman’s body was found in the hills, strangled and raped, with a
dog collar and leash around her neck. Her car was found along
one of the highways. Apparently, she had run out of gas and her
killer had picked her up—either as a Good Samaritan or forcibly
—and had driven her up to where she was found.
I suggested to the police that they release information to the
press in a particular order. First, they should describe the crime
and our crime analysis. Second, they should emphasize the full
thrust of FBI involvement with state and local authorities and
that “if it takes us twenty years, we’re going to get this guy!” And
third, on a busy road like that where a young woman was broken
down, someone had to have seen something. I wanted the third
story to say that there had been reports of someone or something
suspicious around the time of her abduction and that the police
were asking the public to come forward with information.
My reasoning here was that if the killer thought someone
might have seen him at some point (which they probably did),
then he would think he had to neutralize that with the police, to
explain and legitimize his presence on the scene. He would come
forward and say something to the effect of, “I drove by and saw
she was stuck. I pulled over and asked if I could help, but she
said she was okay, so I drove off.”
Now, police do seek help from the public all the time through
the media. But too often they don’t consider it a proactive
technique. I wonder how many times offenders have come
forward who slipped through their fingers because they didn’t
know what to look for. By the way, this is not to imply that
genuine witnesses need have any fear of coming forward with
their stories. You will not become a suspect, but you may very
well help lead to the arrest of one.
In the San Diego case, the technique worked just as I had
outlined it. e UNSUB injected himself into the investigation
and was caught.
“Okay, Douglas, we see your point,” the FBI headquarters
staff responded begrudgingly. “Just keep us informed whenever
you think you’re going to use this approach.” Anything new or
innovative can be scary to a bureaucracy.
I hoped that in one way or another, the press could help bring
forth the Tylenol poisoner. Bob Greene, the popular syndicated
columnist of the Chicago Tribune, met with the police and FBI.
He then wrote a moving article about twelve-year-old Mary
Kellerman, the poisoner’s youngest victim and the only child of a
couple unable to have more children. As the story appeared,
police and FBI agents were ready with surveillance on her home
and the grave. I think most of the people involved thought this
was bullshit, that guilt-ridden and/or happily reminiscing killers
don’t actually return to grave sites. But I urged them to give it a
week.
I was still in Chicago when the police staked out the cemetery,
and I knew I’d face their ire if they didn’t come up with anything.
Stakeouts are boring, uncomfortable work under the best of
circumstances. ey’re even worse in a graveyard at night.
e first night, nothing happens. It’s peaceful and quiet. But
sometime during the second night, the surveillance team thinks
they hear something. ey approach the grave, being careful to
stay out of sight. ey hear the voice of a man just about the age
the profile predicted.
e man is tearful, apparently on the verge of sobbing. “I’m
sorry,” he pleads. “I didn’t mean it. It was an accident!” He begs
the dead girl to forgive him.
Holy shit, they’re thinking, Douglas must be right. ey
pounce on him.
But wait a minute! e name he uses isn’t Mary.
is guy is scared out of his wits. And when the police finally
get a close look, they see he’s standing in front of the grave next
to Mary’s!
It turns out that buried next to Mary Kellerman is the victim
of an unsolved automobile hit-and-run, and her unwitting killer
has come back to confess his crime.
Four or five years later, Chicago PD used the same ploy with
an unsolved murder. Spearheaded by FBI training coordinator
Bob Sagowski, they began giving information to newspapers
around the time of the anniversary of the murder. When police
apprehended the murderer at the grave, he commented simply, “I
wondered what took you so long.”
We didn’t catch the Tylenol poisoner this way. We didn’t catch
a murderer at all. A suspect was apprehended and convicted on
extortion charges linked to the murders, though there wasn’t
sufficient evidence to try him for the murders themselves. He fit
the profile, but had been out of the Chicago area when police
conducted the cemetery stakeout. After his incarceration,
however, no more poisonings were reported.
Of course, since there was no trial, we can’t say with any legal
certainty that this was our man. But it is clear that a certain
percentage of the perpetrators of unsolved serial murders are
actually caught, unbeknownst to the officers and detectives
investigating the cases. When an active killer suddenly stops,
there are three strong explanations aside from his simple decision
to retire. e first is that he’s committed suicide, which can be
true for certain personality types. e second is that he’s left the
area and is actually plying his trade somewhere else. With the
FBI’s VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program)
computer base, we’re working to prevent that from happening by
giving the thousands of police jurisdictions around the country
the ability to share information easily with one another. e
third explanation is that the killer has been picked up for some
other offense—generally burglary or robbery or assault—and is
serving time on the lesser charge without authorities having
connected him to his most grievous offenses.
Since the Tylenol case, there have been numerous product
tampering incidents, although most have been motivated by
more traditional drives. In domestic cases, for example, a spouse’s
murder may be staged to look like product tampering. In
evaluating this type of case, police should consider the number of
incidents reported, whether they’re localized or scattered,
whether the product was consumed in close proximity to where
it was apparently tampered with, and what the relationship has
been between the victim and the individual reporting the crime.
As in any other suspected personal-cause homicide, they should
look for a history of conflict and gather all the information they
can on pre- and postoffense behavior.
A crime that may appear on its surface to have had no
particular intended victim may actually have had a specific target.
And what seems to be a crime of general anger and frustration
may actually involve a motive as traditional as wanting to get
cleanly out of a marriage or a desire to collect insurance or an
inheritance. After the Tylenol publicity, a wife knocked off her
husband using poisoned Tylenol, figuring it would be attributed
to the original killer. e staging was obvious and the details
different enough so that no one was fooled. In these cases,
forensic evidence also usually links the offender. For example,
labs can analyze the source of cyanide or other poisons.
is same type of analysis makes it relatively easy for
investigators to recognize when someone has altered a product
with the intent to sue for money damages, such as placing a dead
mouse in a jar of spaghetti sauce, a rat in a soda can, or a needle
in a bag of snack food. Companies often want to settle quickly to
avoid bad publicity and stay out of court. But forensic science
has now evolved to the point where if the company strongly
suspects product tampering, refuses to settle, and brings the case
to the FBI, the odds are high that the tamperer will be found out
and charged. In the same way, a good investigator will recognize
acts of staged heroism—orchestrated scenarios created by an
individual to get recognition from peers or the public.
e Tylenol case, for all its horror, was something of an
anomaly. It didn’t seem to be primarily an extortion. For an
extortionist to succeed, he must first establish that he has the
capability to make good on his threat. Extortionists who threaten
product tampering, therefore, will typically alter one bottle or
package of the product, mark it in some way, and deliver a
warning in a phone call or a note. e Tylenol poisoner, on the
other hand, didn’t begin with threats. He jumped right into
killing.
By extortionist standards, he wasn’t sophisticated. Based on
the crude nature of the tampering (after these murders, Johnson
& Johnson spent a fortune developing effective tamper-resistant
packaging), I knew this guy wasn’t highly organized. But of those
who do make threats, some of the same guidelines can be used as
would apply to a political-threat analysis to determine whether
the threatener is actually dangerous and capable of carrying out
his announced intention.
e same is true of bombers. If a bomb threat is made, it is
always taken seriously. But quickly, so that society doesn’t grind
to a halt, authorities must determine whether the threat is real.
Bombers and extortionists typically use the word we in their
communications to imply a large group watching from the
shadows. e fact is, though, most of these people are suspicious
loners who don’t trust others.
Bombers tend to fall into one of three categories. ere are
power-motivated bombers attracted to the destruction. ere are
mission-oriented bombers attracted to the thrill of designing,
making, and placing the devices. And there are technician types
who get gratification from the brilliance and cleverness of their
actual design and construction. As far as motives, they range
from extortion to labor disputes, revenge, even suicide.
Our research into bombers shows a repeating general profile.
ey’re usually white males, the age being determined by the
victim or target. ey’re of at least average intelligence, often
quite above, though underachievers. ey’re neat, orderly, and
meticulous, careful planners, nonconfrontational, nonathletic,
cowardly, inadequate personalities. e profile comes from
assessing the target or victim and the type of device (is it more
explosive or incendiary, for instance), much as we profile a serial
killer from a crime scene. We would consider the risk factors
associated with both the victim and the offender, whether the
victim was random or intended, how accessible he or she was,
what time of day the attack occurred, the method of conveyance
(such as through the mail), as well as any unique qualities or
idiosyncrasies in the components or workmanship of the bomb.
Early in my profiling career I developed the first profile on the
now-famous Unabomber (from the FBI code name Unabom),
who got his nickname by targeting universities and professors.
We learn most about bombers from their communications. By
the time Unabomber decided to communicate at length with the
public through his letters to newspapers and multi-thousandword manifesto, he had left a trail of three deaths and twentythree injuries in a seventeen-year career. Among other feats, he
managed temporarily to slow down the entire commercial airline
industry through his promise of a bomb coming out of Los
Angeles International Airport.
Like most bombers, he referred to a group (the “FC” or
“Freedom Club”) as responsible for his terrorism. Still, there is
little doubt he is the type of loner I described.
e profile has been widely published by now and I’ve seen
no reason to alter my judgment. Unfortunately, despite Dr.
Brussel’s groundbreaking work on the Metesky “Mad Bomber”
case, when Unabomber first struck, law enforcement wasn’t as set
up to use our type of analysis as they are now. Most of these guys
are catchable early in their careers. e first and second crimes
are the most significant in terms of behavior, location, and target,
before they start perfecting what they do and moving around the
country. As the years go on, they also expand their ideologies
beyond the simple and elemental grudges against society that get
them going in the first place. I think that had we been where we
are now with profiling in 1979, Unabomber might have been
caught years earlier.
Much of the time, bomb threats are a means of extortion,
directed against an individual or a specific group. In the mid1970s, a bomb threat was phoned in to the president of a bank
in Texas.
In a long, complicated script, the caller says that a few days
before when Southwest Bell sent technicians to the bank, it was
actually his people. ey planted a bomb that he can set off with
a microwave switch, but he won’t do it if the president complies
with his demands.
Now comes the most chilling part. He says he has the
president’s wife, Louise. She drives a Cadillac, goes here in the
morning, then here, et cetera, et cetera. Panicked, the president
has his secretary call his home on another line because he knows
his wife should be there. But no one answers. Now he’s become a
believer.
en the caller makes his money demand: used bills—tens
through hundreds. Don’t contact the police, we can easily
recognize their unmarked cars. Tell your secretary you’ll be
leaving the bank for about forty-five minutes. Don’t contact
anyone. Just before you leave, flash the lights in your office on
and off three times. My group will be watching for this signal.
Leave the money in your car, parked by the side of the road at a
specific heavily trafficked area, leave the motor running and the
parking lights on.
Now, in this particular case, there was no bomb and no
abduction, merely a clever con man targeting the most likely
victim. Everything about this scenario has a purpose. His timing
was based on when the phone company had actually been
working in the bank, so that he could cast them as his bomb
planters. Everyone knows the phone company does technical
work that no one understands or pays much attention to, so it’s
quite believable that they could have been impostors.
Knowing the bank president would call home for his wife, the
extortionist had called her that morning, claiming to be from
Southwest Bell, saying they had received a number of complaints
about obscene phone calls in her neighborhood and they were
trying to track the caller—so between noon and twelve forty-five
today, don’t pick up the phone if it rings; we’ll be running a trap
and trace.
e instruction about leaving the money in the car with the
lights on and the motor running is perhaps the most ingenious
part of the plan. e president thinks the lights are part of the
signal, but in fact, they’re part of the caller’s escape system.
Despite the warning not to contact the police, the extortionist
knows the victim will probably involve them anyway, and the
most dangerous phase for the offender is always the money
exchange, when he presumes the police will be watching. Under
this scenario, if the offender is unfortunate enough to be nabbed
by the police in the car, he can say he was walking down this
busy street, saw a car with lights on and the motor running, and
decided to be a Good Samaritan and turn them off. If the police
grab him at that point, they’ve got nothing. Even if they grab
him with the money, since he’s already established a legitimate
reason to be in the car, he can say he found the bag sitting there
on the seat and was going to turn it in to the police.
For the extortionist, this is a percentage game. He’s got his
script written out and all he has to do is fill in the details. If
today’s targeted victim doesn’t go for it, he’ll try it on another the
next day. Eventually, one of them is going to bite, and he’ll end
up with a nice piece of change for his efforts without actually
having to kidnap or bomb anyone. In these cases, the script is
generally a good piece of evidence since the offender will keep it,
knowing it will be useful for future jobs. Because the one thing
he knows is that with a few simple advance arrangements,
anyone can be his victim.
Once authorities were finally onto his tricks, he was
apprehended, tried, and convicted. He turned out to be a former
disc jockey who had decided to put his gift of gab to more shortterm advantage.
What’s the difference between this type of individual and one
who actually does kidnap? ey’re both in it for profit, so neither
one wants to expose himself to the victim any more than
necessary because killing is not part of the aim. e big
difference is that the true kidnapper will generally need someone
to help carry out his scheme, and while the simple extortionist is
basically a clever con man, the kidnapper is a sociopath. Killing
the victim is not his intention, but he is clearly willing to do so
to fulfill his goals.
Steve Mardigian participated in the case of an Exxon
Corporation vice president who was abducted in front of his
home in New Jersey and held for ransom. In the struggle, he was
shot in the arm by accident. e kidnappers—a former company
security guard and his wife—went ahead with the abduction and
held the wounded man (who had a heart condition) in a box,
where he died. e reason for the box—or its equivalent—is so
that the abductors can have as little contact with the victim as
possible and not have to personalize him. In this case, the
kidnappers professed regret at the outcome and a sense of
desperation that led them to the crime in the first place. But they
did it, and they carried it out step-by-step without hesitation.
ey were willing to have someone else die for their selfish
purposes, and that is one of the definitions of sociopathic
behavior.
As terrifying as it is, unlike certain other serious crimes,
kidnapping is such a difficult act to get away with that an
investigator really has to evaluate it carefully and with a skeptical
eye, looking closely at victimology and preoffense behavior. And,
while acknowledging that anyone can be a victim, the
investigator has to be able to answer the question: why this
particular victim?
A couple of years ago, I got an urgent call one night at home.
A detective in Oregon proceeded to tell me the story of a young
woman who went to school in his district. She was being stalked,
but neither she nor anyone else could discover the identity of the
stalker. She would see the stalker in the woods, but by the time
her father or boyfriend went out to look, he was gone. He would
call the house, but never when anyone else was home. e girl
was turning into a basket case. After several unnerving weeks of
this, she was at a restaurant with her boyfriend. She left the table
to go to the ladies’ room. While leaving the rest room, she was
grabbed and quickly dragged out to the parking lot, where her
assailant savagely stuck a gun barrel into her vagina, threatened
to kill her if she went to the police, then let her go. She was
emotionally traumatized and couldn’t provide a good description.
Now, apparently, she’d been abducted as she left the library
one night. Her car was found in the parking lot. ere had been
no communication and things were beginning to look pretty
grim.
I asked the detective to tell me about the victim. She was a
beautiful girl who’d always done well in school. But last year she’d
had a baby and had had some problems with her family,
particularly her father, about support. Her grades had been going
to hell lately, especially after the stalking began.
I said not to say anything to the father just yet in case I was
wrong and the young woman ended up dead, but this sounded
to me like a hoax. Who would stalk her? She had a steady
boyfriend and no recent breakups. Generally, when a
noncelebrity is stalked, it is by someone who knows that person
in one way or another. Stalkers aren’t that good or careful at what
they do. If she saw the stalker, her father and boyfriend should
not have missed him each time. No one else ever got the phone
calls. And when police put a trap and trace on the line, the calls
suddenly stopped. It also happened that the kidnapping took
place right before final exams—not at all a coincidental finding.
e proactive strategy, I suggested, would be to have the
father be interviewed by the media, emphasize the positiveness of
their relationship, say how much he loves her and wants her
back, appealing to the kidnapper to let her go. If I was right, she
should turn up a day or two later, banged up and dirty with a
story about how she was abducted, abused, and thrown out of a
car on the side of a road.
is is what happened. She was pretty banged up and filthy
with a story of abduction. I said that the interrogation—in this
case in the form of a debriefing—should focus on what we really
believed had happened. It should not be accusatory, but
acknowledge that she was having a lot of trouble with her
parents; going through a lot of stress, trauma, and pain; was
panicked by exams; and needed a face-saving way out. She
should be told that she didn’t need punishment, what she needed
was counseling and understanding, and that she would get it.
Once that was made clear, she confessed to the hoax.
is is one of those cases you sweat, though. If you’re wrong,
the consequences are horrible, because when stalking is for real, it
can be a terrifying and, too often, deadly crime.
Most often, whether we’re talking about the stalking of a
celebrity or an ordinary person, the stalking begins with love or
admiration. John Hinckley “loved” Jodie Foster and wanted her
to return his love. However, she was a beautiful movie star going
to Yale and he was an inadequate nobody. He believed he had to
do something to equalize the situation and impress her. And
what could be more “impressive” than the historic act of
assassinating the president of the United States? In his more lucid
moments, he must have realized that his dream of the two of
them living happily ever after together wasn’t going to come
about. But through his act, he did achieve one of his goals. He
became famous, and in a perverse way, he would be forever
connected to Foster in the public mind.
As with most of these cases, there was an immediate stressor
with Hinckley. Around the time he shot President Reagan his
father had given him an ultimatum about getting a job and
supporting himself on his own.
Secret Service agent Ken Baker conducted a prison interview
with Mark David Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon.
Chapman felt a strong connection to the former Beatle and, on a
superficial level, tried to emulate him. He collected all of
Lennon’s songs and even went through a string of Asian
girlfriends, to imitate Lennon’s marriage to Yoko Ono. But as
happens with many of these types, eventually he reached a point
where his inadequacy was overwhelming. He could no longer
deal with the disparity between himself and his hero and so had
to kill him. Chillingly, one of the things that moved Hinckley to
commit his crime and become famous (notorious is actually a
much better word) was the example of Chapman.
I interviewed Arthur Bremer, who stalked and then attempted
to assassinate Alabama governor George Wallace in Maryland
while he was running for president, leaving Wallace paralyzed
and in chronic pain for life. Bremmer didn’t hate Wallace. Prior
to the shooting, he’d stalked President Nixon for several weeks
but couldn’t get close enough to him. He just got desperate to do
something to show the world his worth, and Wallace was
approachable, essentially another victim in the wrong place at the
wrong time.
e cases of stalking that have turned to assassination are
alarming in their number. In the case of political figures, there is
the construct of a cause for the killing, although this is virtually
always a cover for a deeply inadequate nobody who wants to be a
somebody. In the case of movie stars and celebrities like John
Lennon, even that excuse is meaningless. Among the most tragic
of the cases is the murder of twenty-one-year-old Rebecca
Schaeffer in front of her Los Angeles apartment in 1989. e
beautiful and talented young actress, who had become widely
known as Pam Dawber’s younger sister on the television series
My Sister Sam, was shot once, as she answered the front door, by
Robert John Bardo, an unemployed nineteen-year-old from
Tucson whose most recent job had been as janitor in a Jack in the
Box. Like Chapman, Bardo had begun as an adoring fan. His
adoration had grown into obsession, and if he couldn’t then have
a “normal” relationship with her, he would have to “possess” her
in another way.
As we all know by now, stalking targets are not limited to the
famous. ere are, of course, frequent cases of people being
stalked by former spouses or lovers. e deadly stage is reached
when the stalker finally thinks, “If I can’t have her (or him), no
one else can either.” But Jim Wright, our unit’s most experienced
specialist on stalking and among the leading experts on the
subject in law enforcement, points out that anyone who deals
with the public, particularly women, may be vulnerable to
stalkers. In other words, the object of a stalker’s desire need not
be on television or the movie screen. She might be a waitress at
the restaurant down the block or a teller at the local bank. Or she
could even work in the same store or business.
at was what happened to Kris Welles, a young woman who
worked for Conlans Furniture Company in Missoula, Montana.
Kris was efficient and well respected and worked her way up in
the company first to sales manager and then, in 1985, to overall
manager.
At the same time Kris worked in the office, a man named
Wayne Nance worked in the warehouse. He tended to keep to
himself, but he seemed to like Kris, and she was always cordial
and friendly to him. Still, Wayne’s personality blew hot and cold,
and the temper she perceived just beneath the surface scared her.
No one had any complaints with Wayne’s work habits, though.
Day in and day out, he consistently worked the hardest of
anyone in the warehouse.
What neither Kris nor her husband, Doug, a local gun dealer,
knew was that Wayne Nance was obsessed with her. He watched
her all the time and kept a cardboard box filled with souvenirs of
her—snapshots, notes she had written at the office, anything that
belonged to her.
e other thing neither the Welleses nor the Missoula police
knew was that Wayne Nance was a killer. In 1974, he had
sexually molested and stabbed a five-year-old girl. It was later
discovered he had also bound, gagged, and shot several adult
women, including the mother of his best friend. Alarmingly, all
of this had taken place in counties neighboring where he now
lived. Yet even in sparsely populated Montana, one police
jurisdiction had no idea of the criminal activity recorded in
another jurisdiction.
Kris Welles didn’t know any of this until the night Nance
broke into her and Doug’s home outside of town. ey had a
female golden retriever, but the dog put up no resistance to him.
Armed with a handgun, he shot Doug, tied him up in the
basement, then forced Kris upstairs into the bedroom where he
tied her to the bed so he could rape her. She obviously knew him
well and he made no attempt to hide his identity
Meanwhile, in the basement, Doug had managed to wriggle
free from his bonds. Weak and on the verge of unconsciousness
from pain and loss of blood, he staggered over to a table where a
rifle loader from his store was set up. He managed to feed one
round into the rifle, then mustering all his remaining strength, he
pulled himself slowly and agonizingly up the basement stairs. As
quietly as he could, he made his way up the stairs to the second
floor, and in the hallway, his eyes blurring, he took aim for his
one shot at Nance.
He had to get him before Nance saw him and went for his
own gun. Nance was unhurt and had more shots available. Doug
would be no match for him.
He squeezed the trigger. He hit Nance, knocking him
backward. But then Nance got up again and started coming for
him. e shot hadn’t been deadly enough. Nance kept coming
for him toward the staircase. ere was nowhere to go and Doug
couldn’t leave Kris alone there, so he did the only thing he could.
He charged forward at Nance, using his empty rifle as a club. He
kept hammering at the powerful Nance until Kris could get
herself free and help him.
To this day, the Welles case remains one of the few on record
in which intended victims of a serial killer were actually able to
fight back and kill their attacker in self-defense. eir story is a
miraculous one, and we have had them out several times to speak
to classes at Quantico. is unassuming couple have been able to
give us rare insight from the perspective of victims who became
heroes. Having been to hell and back that night, they are
amazingly warm, sensitive, and “together” people.
At the end of one of their presentations at Quantico, a police
officer in the class asked them, “If Wayne Nance had lived and
there was no death penalty—that is, if he were still sharing the
earth with you—would you both be as mentally sound as you are
now?” ey turned and looked at each other and then silently
agreed on their response. “Almost definitely not,” said Doug
Welles.
18
Battle of the Shrinks
What kind of person could have done such a thing?
During our serial-killer study, Bob Ressler and I were in Joliet,
Illinois, where we’d just interviewed Richard Speck. I was back in
my hotel room that evening and was watching the news on CBS
when I saw Dan Rather interviewing another killer, named
omas Vanda, who also happened to be incarcerated at Joliet
Penitentiary. Vanda was in for killing a woman through multiple
stab wounds. He’d been in and out of mental institutions for
much of his life, and every time he’d been “cured” and let out, he
would commit another crime. Before the murder for which he
was now doing time, he’d killed once before.
I called Ressler and said we had to talk to him while we were
here. From the televised interview, I could tell he was the perfect
inadequate type. He could as easily have been an arsonist as a
killer. Or, if he had the tools and skills, he could have been a
bomber.
We went back to the prison the next day and Vanda agreed to
see us. He was curious as to what we were doing there, and he
didn’t get many visitors. Before the interview, we went over his
file.
Vanda was white, about five foot nine, and in his midtwenties. He had a soft, inappropriate affect and smiled a lot.
Even while smiling, he still had “the look”—eyes darting back
and forth all the time, nervous twitches, hand-rubbing. You
wouldn’t comfortably turn your back on this guy. e first thing
he wanted to know was how I thought he looked on TV. When I
told him he looked good, he laughed and loosened up. Among
the things he told us was that he had joined a Bible study group
in prison and thought it had helped him a lot. It may very well
have. But I’ve seen a lot of inmates nearing parole-board
appearances join religious groups to show they’re on the right
path to be released.
You could argue about whether this guy belonged in a
maximum security prison or a secure mental hospital, but after
the interview, I went to see the staff psychiatrist who treated him.
I asked him how Vanda was doing.
e psychiatrist, who was around fifty, gave me a positive
response, saying Vanda was “responding very nicely to
medication and therapy.” e psychiatrist mentioned the Bible
study group as one example and said Vanda could be ready for
parole if this progress continued.
I asked him if he knew the specifics of what Vanda had done.
“No, I don’t want to know,” he replied. “I don’t have the time,
with all the inmates I have to deal with here.” And, he added, he
didn’t want to unfairly influence his relationship with the patient.
“Well, Doctor, let me tell you what omas Vanda did,” I
insist. Before he can protest, I went on to relate how this asocial,
loner-type personality joins a church group, and how, after a
meeting when everyone else is gone, he propositions the young
woman who hosted the meeting. She turns him down and Vanda
doesn’t take the rejection real well. Guys like that generally don’t.
He knocks her down, goes to her kitchen, comes back with a
knife, and stabs her numerous times. en, as she’s on the floor
dying, he inserts his penis into an open wound in her abdomen
and ejaculates.
I’ve got to say, I find this amazing. She’s like a rag doll at this
point. Her body is warm, she’s bleeding, he’s got to be getting
blood on himself. He can’t even depersonalize her. And yet he’s
able to get an erection and get it off. So you’ll understand why I
insist this is a crime of anger, not sex. What’s going through his
mind is not sex—it’s anger and rage. is, by the way, is why it
doesn’t do any good to castrate repeat rapists—as satisfying and
fulfilling as the idea may be to some of us. e problem is, it
doesn’t stop them, either physically or emotionally. Rape is
definitely a crime of anger. If you cut someone’s balls off, you’re
going to have one angry man.
I finished my story about Vanda. “You’re disgusting,
Douglas!” the psychiatrist declared. “Get out of my office!”
“I’m disgusting?” I countered. “You’re gonna be in a position
to make a recommendation that omas Vanda is responding to
therapy and could be freed, and you don’t know who in the hell
you’re talking to when you’re dealing with these inmates. How
are you supposed to understand them if you haven’t taken the
time to look at the crime-scene photos or reports, to go over the
autopsy protocols? Have you looked at the way the crime was
committed? Do you know if it was planned? Do you understand
the behavior leading up to it? Do you know how he left the
crime scene? Do you know if he tried to get away with it? Did he
try to establish an alibi? How in the hell do you know if he’s
dangerous or not?”
He didn’t have an answer and I don’t think I made a convert
that day, but this is something I feel strongly about. It’s the basis
of what we do in my unit. e dilemma, as I’ve stated many
times before, is that much of psychiatric therapy is based on selfreporting. A patient coming to a therapist under normal
circumstances has a vested interest in revealing his true thoughts
and feelings. A convict desirous of early release, on the other
hand, has a vested interest in telling the therapist what he wants
to hear. And to the extent that the therapist takes that report at
face value without correlating it with other information about
the subject, that can be a real failing of the system. Ed Kemper
and Monte Rissell, to name but two, were in therapy while they
were committing their crimes, and both managed to remain
undetected. In fact, both showed “progress” to their therapists.
e problem as I see it is that you get young psychiatrists and
psychologists and social workers who are idealistic, having been
taught at their universities that they really can make a difference.
en they come up against these guys in prison, and they want
to feel that they’ve changed them. Often, they don’t understand
that in trying to assess these convicts, they’re actually assessing
individuals who themselves are expert in assessing people! In a
short time, the convict will know if the doctor has done his or
her homework, and if not, he’ll be able to downplay the crime
and its impact on victims. Few criminals will willingly give out
the nitty-gritty details to someone who doesn’t already have
them. at’s why complete preparation was so critical in our
prison interviews.
As with omas Vanda’s doctor, people in the helping
professions often don’t want to be prejudiced by knowing the
gory details of what the criminal did. But as I always tell my
classes, if you want to understand Picasso, you have to study his
art. If you want to understand the criminal personality, you have
to study his crime.
e difference is, the mental-health professionals start with
the personality and infer behavior from that perspective. My
people and I start with the behavior and infer the personality
from that perspective.
ere are, of course, varying perspectives on the issue of
criminal responsibility. Dr. Stanton Samenow is a psychologist
who collaborated with the late psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Yochelson
on a pioneering study at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington,
D.C., about criminal behavior. After years of firsthand research
that gradually stripped away most of his preconceived notions,
Samenow concluded in his penetrating and insightful book,
Inside the Criminal Mind, that “criminals think differently from
responsible people.” Criminal behavior, Samenow believes, is not
so much a question of mental illness as character defect.
Dr. Park Dietz, who works with us frequently, has stated,
“None of the serial killers that I’ve had the occasion to study or
examine has been legally insane, but none has been normal,
either. ey’ve all been people who’ve got mental disorders. But
despite their mental disorders, which have to do with their sexual
interests and their character, they’ve been people who knew what
they were doing, knew what they were doing was wrong, but
chose to do it anyway.”
It’s important to keep in mind here that insanity is a legal
concept, not a medical or psychiatric term. It doesn’t mean
someone is or is not “sick.” It has to do with whether that person
is or is not responsible for his or her actions.
Now, if you believe that someone like omas Vanda is
insane, fine. I think a case can be made for that. But once we’ve
carefully examined the data, I think we have to face that
whatever the omas Vandas of the world have, it may not be
curable. If we accepted that, they wouldn’t be let out so fast to
keep doing what they do over and over again. Remember, this
murder wasn’t his first.
ere has been a lot of talk lately about the concept of
criminal insanity, and this talk isn’t new. It goes back at least
hundreds of years in Anglo-American jurisprudence, to William
Lambard’s Eirenarcha, or “Of the Office of the Justices of Peace”
of the 1500s.
e first organized statement of insanity as a defense against
criminal charges is the M’Naghten Rule of 1843, named after
Daniel M’Naghten (sometimes spelled McNaughten or
McNaghten), who tried to kill British prime minister Sir Robert
Peel and did manage to shoot Peel’s private secretary. Peel, by the
way, was responsible for organizing London’s police force. To this
day, London cops are still referred to as bobbies in his honor.
After M’Naghten was acquitted, public outrage was so great
that the lord chief justice was called before the House of Lords to
explain the logic. e basic elements state that a defendant is not
guilty if his mental condition deprived him of the ability to know
the wrongfulness of his actions or understand their nature and
quality; in other words, did he know the difference between right
and wrong?
e insanity doctrine evolved over the years into what was
often referred to as the “irresistible impulse test,” which stated
that a defendant was not guilty if, because of mental illness, he
was unable to control his actions or conform his conduct to the
law.
It received a major overhaul in 1954 with Judge David
Bazelon’s Court of Appeals ruling in Durham v. United States,
which held that a defendant is not criminally responsible if his
crime was the “product of mental disease or defect,” and if he
would not have committed the crime but for that disease or
defect.
Durham, which gave such broad latitude and wasn’t primarily
concerned with appreciating the difference between right and
wrong, wasn’t terribly popular with law enforcement personnel
and many judges and prosecutors. In 1972, in another Court of
Appeals case, United States v. Brawner, it was abandoned in favor
of the American Law Institute (or ALI) Model Penal Code Test,
which hearkened back to M’Naghten and irresistible impulse in
saying that the mental defect had to make the defendant lack
substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct
or conform his conduct to the requirement of the law. In one
form or another, the ALI Test has enjoyed increasing popularity
among courts as time goes on.
But along with this discussion, which often degrades into a
speculation on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,
I think we have to deal with a more basic concept. And that is
dangerousness.
One of the classic confrontations in the ongoing battle of the
shrinks was the serial-murder trial of Arthur J. Shawcross in
Rochester, New York, in 1990. Shawcross had been accused of
the murders of a string of local prostitutes and street people
whose bodies had turned up in the wooded areas in and around
the Genesee River gorge. e murders had gone on for nearly a
year. e later bodies had also been mutilated after death.
After doing a detailed—and, as it turned out, highly accurate
—profile, Gregg McCrary studied the UNSUB’s developing
behavior. When police discovered a body that had been
mutilated, Gregg realized that the killer was going back to the
dump sites to spend time with his prey. He then urged police to
comb the woods to locate the body of one of the still-missing
women. If they could do that, then secretly stake out the site,
Gregg was sure they would eventually find the killer there.
As it happened, after several days of aerial surveillance, New
York State Police did find a body in Salmon Creek along State
Route 31. At the same time, Inspector John McCaffrey noticed a
man in a car parked on a low bridge spanning the water. State
and city police were called in to follow him. e man they
picked up was Arthur Shawcross.
Under interrogation from a team led by Dennis Blythe of the
State Police and Leonard Boriello of the Rochester Police
Department, Shawcross confessed to several of the crimes. e
key issue at his intensely covered ten-count murder trial was
whether or not he was insane at the time of the killings.
e defense brought in Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a well-known
psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York, who had done
important work on the effects of violence on children. Lewis had
become convinced that most, if not all, violent criminal behavior
resulted from a combination of childhood abuse or trauma and
some kind of physical or organic condition, such as epilepsy, an
injury, or some kind of lesion, cyst, or tumor. ere is, of course,
the case of Charles Whitman, the twenty-five-year-old
engineering student who climbed to the top of the clock tower at
the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 and opened fire on
passersby below. Before police could surround the tower and kill
him ninety minutes later, sixteen men and women lay dead and
another thirty wounded. Prior to the incident, Whitman had
complained of periodic murderous rages. When doctors
performed an autopsy, they found a tumor in the temporal lobe
of his brain.
Did the tumor cause Whitman’s deadly behavior? We have no
way of knowing. But Lewis wanted to show the jury that as a
result of a small benign temporal-lobe cyst that showed up on
Shawcross’s MRI, a form of epilepsy she characterized as “partial
complex-seizure state,” post-traumatic stress from Vietnam, and
what he claimed was severe childhood physical and sexual abuse
at the hands of his mother, Arthur Shawcross was not responsible
for his episodes of extreme violence. In fact, she testified, he was
in some kind of fugue state when he killed each woman; his
memory of each episode would have been impaired or
nonexistent.
One of the problems with this line of reasoning is that weeks
and months after the murders, Shawcross was able to relate the
details to Boriello and Blythe in minute detail. In some cases, he
actually brought them to body dump sites the police had been
unable to find. He was probably able to do this because he had
fantasized about each one so many times that they were fresh in
his mind.
He took steps to destroy some of the evidence so the police
wouldn’t find him. After his arrest, he also wrote a rather analytic
letter to his girlfriend (he had a wife, too), saying that he hoped
for the insanity defense because doing time in a mental hospital
would be a lot easier than doing time in prison.
On that score, Shawcross clearly knew whereof he spoke. His
troubles with the law began in 1969 when he was convicted of
burglary and arson in Watertown, north of Syracuse. Less than a
year later, he was arrested again and admitted strangling a young
boy and girl. e girl had also been sexually molested. For those
two crimes, Shawcross was sentenced to twenty-five years in
prison. He was paroled after fifteen. at, if you recall from a
previous chapter, was why age was the one aspect of the profile
that Gregg McCrary had called wrong. Shawcross’s fifteen years
in stir had merely been a holding pattern.
Now let’s take this step-by-step. First of all, if you ask me or
just about any of the many thousands of cops, prosecutors, and
federal agents I’ve worked with over the course of my career,
you’ll get a resounding consensus that twenty-five years for
ending the lives of two children is pretty obscene in and of itself.
But second, to let this guy out early, it seems to me you have to
presume one of two opposite premises.
Premise number one: despite this guy’s bad background,
despite his dysfunctional family, the alleged abuse, the lack of
good education, his violent past, and everything else, prison life
was such a wonderful, spiritually uplifting, eye-opening, and
rehabilitative experience that Shawcross saw the light, realized the
error of his ways, and because of all the good influence in prison
resolved to turn over a new leaf and be an upright, law-abiding
citizen from that moment hence.
Okay, if you don’t accept that one, how about premise
number two: prison life was so completely horrible, so
unpleasant and traumatic every day, so thoroughly punishing in
every way, that despite his bad background and continuing desire
to rape and kill children, he never wanted to be back in prison
and resolved to do anything he could to avoid going back.
I agree, that one’s just as unlikely. But if you don’t accept
either of these two premises, how in the hell do you let someone
like that out without considering the strong possibility that he’s
going to kill again?
Quite clearly, some types of killers are much more likely to
repeat their crimes than others. But for the violent, sexually
based serial killers, I find myself agreeing with Dr. Park Dietz
that “it’s hard to imagine any circumstance under which they
should be released to the public again.” Ed Kemper, who’s a lot
brighter and has a lot more in the way of personal insight than
most of the other killers I’ve talked to, acknowledges candidly
that he shouldn’t be let out.
ere are just too many horror stories out there. Richard
Marquette, whom I interviewed and who had a string of
disorderly conduct, attempted rape, and assault and battery
charges against him in Oregon by his early twenties, progressed
to rape, murder, and mutilation after an unsuccessful sexual
experience with a woman he’d picked up in a Portland bar. He
fled the area, was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and was
arrested in California. He was convicted of first-degree murder
and sentenced to life in prison. Paroled after twelve years, he
killed and dissected two more women before being captured
again. What in God’s name led a parole board to think this guy
was no longer dangerous?
I can’t speak for the FBI, the Justice Department, or anyone
else. But I can say that for myself, I would much rather have on
my conscience keeping a killer in jail who might or might not
kill again if sprung, than the death of an innocent man, woman,
or child as a result of the release of that killer.
It’s an American attribute to think that things are always
getting better, that they can always be improved upon, that we
can accomplish anything we set out to do. But the more I see,
the more pessimistic I become about the concept of
rehabilitation for certain types of offenders. What they went
through as children is often horrible. at doesn’t necessarily
mean the damage can be undone at a later date. And contrary to
what judges, defense attorneys, and mental health professionals
might want to believe, good behavior in prison isn’t necessarily
predictive of acceptable behavior in the outside world.
In virtually every respect, Shawcross had been a model
prisoner. He was quiet, kept to himself, did what he was told,
and didn’t bother anyone. But what my colleagues and I have
found and have tried desperately to get across to others in the
business of correction and forensic psychology is that
dangerousness is situational. If you can keep someone in a wellordered environment where he doesn’t have choices to make, he
may be fine. But put him back in the environment in which he
did badly before, his behavior can quickly change.
Take the case of Jack Henry Abbot, the convicted murderer
who wrote In the Belly of the Beast, a moving and penetrating
memoir of life in prison. Realizing his exceptional talent as a
writer and believing that anyone so sensitive and insightful must
be rehabilitated, such literary lights as Norman Mailer
campaigned to have Abbot paroled. He became the toast of New
York. But within a few months of his release, he got into an
argument with a waiter in Greenwich Village and killed him.
As Al Brantley, a former Behavioral Science instructor who is
now a member of the Investigative Support Unit, put it in one of
his National Academy lectures, “e best predictor of future
behavior, or future violent acting out, is a past history of
violence.”
No one would accuse Arthur Shawcross of being anywhere
near as bright or talented as Jack Henry Abbot. But he was also
able to convince a parole board he could be released. After his
parole, Shawcross first settled in Binghamton, where an angry
community mounted a campaign against him and he left after
two months. He was relocated to the larger and more
anonymous metropolitan area of Rochester, where he took a job
as a salad preparer with a food-distribution company. A year after
his arrival, he began killing again—a different targeted victim
this time, yet no less vulnerable. During her examinations of
Shawcross, Dorothy Lewis put him under hypnosis several times
and “regressed” him to earlier phases of his life where he acted
out such episodes of abuse as his mother’s insertion of a broom
handle far up his rectum. During these recorded sessions, he is
seen to take on other personalities, including that of his mother,
in a scene eerily reminiscent of Psycho. (Shawcross’s mother,
however, denied ever abusing her son and denounced him as a
liar.)
In her work at Bellevue, Lewis has documented some
compelling cases of multiple personality in children who had
been abused. ey are so young that it would be difficult to
conceive of them being able to fake this. But as Lewis has
demonstrated, the rare cases of multiple personality disorder
begin early in childhood, often during the preverbal phase. In
adults, it seems the only time you really hear about multiple
personality disorder is after someone is on trial for murder.
Somehow, it never comes up until then. Kenneth Bianchi, one of
two cousins who together committed the Hillside Strangler
murders in San Francisco in the 1970s, claimed after his arrest to
be a multiple. John Wayne Gacy tried the same approach.
(I’ve often joked that if you have an offender with multiple
personalities, I’ll let the innocent personalities go as long as I can
lock up the guilty one.)
For the Shawcross trial, lead prosecutor Charles Siragusa, who
did a masterful job, called on Park Dietz to present the other
side. Dietz examined Shawcross just as extensively as Lewis had,
and Shawcross came up with a lot of specific details about the
murders. While Dietz didn’t make any absolute judgment about
the veracity of the stories of abuse, he thought they sounded at
least plausible. Nevertheless, he did not think Shawcross was
delusional, found no evidence he had suffered from blackouts or
loss of memory, found no correlation between his behavior and
any organic neurological findings, and concluded that whatever
mental or emotional problems he might have, Arthur Shawcross
understood the difference between right and wrong and was able
to make the choice as to whether he killed or not. And on at least
ten occasions here, and probably more, he had chosen to do so.
When Len Boriello asked him why he had killed these
women, he replied simply, “Taking care of business.”
True psychotics—those who have lost touch with reality—
don’t commit serious crimes very often. And when they do, they
are usually so disorganized and make so little attempt to avoid
detection that they are generally caught fairly quickly. Richard
Trenton Chase, who killed women because he thought he needed
their blood to stay alive, was a psychotic. If he couldn’t get
human blood, he’d settle for what was at hand. When Chase was
placed in a mental institution, he continued to catch rabbits,
bleed them, and inject their blood into his arm. He would catch
small birds, bite off their heads, and drink their blood. is one
was for real. But for a killer to avoid detection and get away with
ten murders, he has to be pretty good at it. Don’t make the
mistake of confusing a psychopath with a psychotic.
During the trial, Shawcross always maintained a stoic and
immobile, almost catatonic, demeanor toward the jury. It was as
if he were in a trancelike state, unable to comprehend what was
going on around him. Yet the police officers and marshals who
guarded and escorted him reported that as soon as he was outside
the jury’s sight and hearing, he would loosen up, become
talkative, sometimes joke around. He knew a lot was at stake in
selling the insanity plea.
One of the cleverest, most resourceful—and, I have to say,
most charming—criminals I’ve ever studied and interviewed was
Gary Trapnell. He’d been in and out of prison most of his adult
life and at one point actually convinced a young woman to
secure a helicopter to land in the middle of the prison yard and
rescue him. During one of his notable crimes—an airplane
hijacking in the early 1970s—Trapnell is in the plane on the
ground trying to negotiate terms for his getaway. In the midst of
this, he raises his fist in the air for cameras to catch and demands,
“Free Angela Davis!”
“ ‘Free Angela Davis’? What’s this ‘free Angela Davis’?” is
comes as something of a shock to most of the law enforcement
people working on the case. ere’s nothing in Trapnell’s
background to suggest that he’s in any way emotionally
committed to the young black California professor’s radical
causes. ere’s nothing to suggest he’s political in any way, and
here, as one of his demands, he wants Angela Davis freed from
prison. e guy must be loony. at’s the only logical
explanation.
Later, after his surrender and conviction, when I interviewed
him in the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, I asked him
about this demand.
He said something to the effect of, “When I saw I wasn’t
going to work my way out of this one, I knew I’d be doing some
hard time. And I figured if the big black brothers thought I was a
political prisoner, I’d be less likely to get my ass raped in the
shower.”
Not only was Trapnell fully rational at the time, he was
planning ahead, virtually the opposite of being crazy. In fact, he
wrote his own memoirs, entitled e Fox Is Crazy, Too. is
nugget of information also gave us tremendous insight into
negotiations. If some totally off-the-wall demand suddenly comes
up, it could mean that in his mind, the offender has already
moved on to the next stage and the negotiator can react
accordingly.
Trapnell told me something else I found very, very interesting.
He said that if I gave him a copy of the current edition of DSM,
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and
pointed to any condition described in it, by the next day he
could convince any psychiatrist that he was genuinely suffering
from the affliction. Again, Trapnell’s got a lot more on the ball
than Shawcross. But just as it doesn’t take all that much
imagination to know you’ve got a better shot at parole if you tell
the shrink you’re feeling much better and no longer have any
interest in molesting little boys, it stands to reason that your
fugue-state explanation will play better if the jury can actually see
you in something of a trance.
For a long time, the law enforcement community tried to rely
on DSM for guidance and definition about what constituted a
serious mental disorder and what did not. But most of us found
the reference book to be of little value in what we did. is was
one of the motivations for developing the Crime Classification
Manual, which was published in 1992. e basic structure of the
book grew out of my doctoral dissertation. Ressler, Ann Burgess,
and her husband, Allen, a professor of management in Boston,
collaborated with me as coauthors. Other members of the
Investigative Support and Behavioral Science Units, including
Greg Cooper, Roy Hazelwood, Ken Lanning, Gregg McCrary,
Jud Ray, Pete Smerick, and Jim Wright, worked with us as
contributors.
With CCM we set about to organize and classify serious
crimes by their behavioral characteristics and explain them in a
way that a strictly psychological approach such as DSM has never
been able to do. For example, you won’t find the type of murder
scenario of which O.J. Simpson was accused in DSM. You will
find it in CCM. What we were trying to do was separate the
wheat from the chaff as far as behavioral evidence was concerned
and help investigators and the legal community focus in on
which considerations may be relevant and which are not.
Not surprisingly, defendants and their attorneys will bring up
anything they possibly can to avoid assuming responsibility for
their actions. Among the laundry list of factors Shawcross’s team
suggested had contributed to his insanity was the post-traumatic
stress disorder from Vietnam. Research indicated that Shawcross
had seen no combat. But this wasn’t a new one. It had been used
many times before. Duane Samples, who disemboweled two
women in Silverton, Oregon, on the night of December 9, 1975,
claimed PTSD as his defense. Only one of the women died, but
I’ve seen the crime-scene photos. Both of them look like
autopsies. Robert Ressler discovered that Samples hadn’t seen
action, either, despite his claims. e day before the attack,
however, Samples had written a letter describing his longstanding fantasy of disemboweling a beautiful naked woman.
In 1981, Ressler went out to Oregon to help prosecutors
explain why the governor should not follow through with his
intention to parole Samples. e argument worked, though he
was finally paroled ten years later.
Is Samples insane? Was he temporarily insane when he cut up
the two women? e natural tendency would be to say that
anyone who could do such a horrible, perverse thing must truly
be “sick.” And I wouldn’t disagree with that. But did he know
what he was doing was wrong? And did he choose to do it
anyway? ose are the important questions as far as I’m
concerned.
Arthur Shawcross’s trial in Rochester City Court lasted more
than five weeks, during which prosecutor Siragusa displayed a
deeper and more complete understanding of forensic psychiatry
than I have seen from virtually any doctor. During the trial, every
minute of which was televised, he became a local hero. When the
jury was finally handed the case after closing arguments, they
took less than a day to reach a verdict of guilty of murder in the
second degree on all charges. is judge made sure Shawcross
would not have the opportunity to repeat his actions. He
sentenced him to two hundred fifty years to life in the state
penitentiary.
And this brings up another aspect of the insanity defense, one
that a good many people don’t realize: juries don’t like it and
don’t often go for it.
ey don’t go for it for two reasons, I believe. One is that it
strains credibility that multiple killers are so compelled to
commit their crimes that they have no choice. Keep in mind that
no serial killer in my experience ever felt so compelled to kill that
he did so in the presence of a uniformed police officer.
e second reason juries don’t go for the insanity defense is an
even more basic one. After all the legal and psychiatric and
academic arguments are stripped away, when it finally gets down
to the deliberation of a defendant’s fate, jurors realize
instinctively that these guys are dangerous. Whatever the decent
men and women of Milwaukee might intellectually have felt
about Jeffrey Dahmer’s sanity or lack thereof, I don’t believe they
were willing to entrust his future (and their community’s) to a
mental institution about whose security and judgment in keeping
him they couldn’t be sure. If they put him in prison, his
dangerousness would more likely be held in check.
I don’t mean to imply that most psychiatrists or mental health
professionals are hot to spring dangerous offenders from
incarceration and put them back in situations where they can do
more harm. What I am suggesting is that in most instances, from
my experience, these people don’t see enough of what we do to
be able to make informed judgments. Even if they have forensic
experience, it’s often limited to a particular area, which is what
they will then rely on.
One of my first cases as a profiler involved the murder of an
elderly woman, Anna Berliner, in her home in Oregon. e local
police had consulted a clinical psychologist about the type of
UNSUB they were looking for. Among her injuries were four
deep pencil stab wounds in the chest. e psychologist had
conducted interviews with about fifty men charged with or
convicted of homicide. Most of these examinations had been
done in prison. Based on his experience, he predicted that the
offender would be someone with a fair amount of prison time,
probably a drug dealer, because only in prison is a sharpened
pencil widely considered a deadly weapon. People on the outside,
he reasoned, wouldn’t think to use an ordinary pencil to attack
someone.
When the police contacted me, I gave them an opposite
opinion. I thought the age and vulnerability of the victim, the
overkill, the fact that it was a daytime crime and that nothing of
great value was missing, suggested an inexperienced juvenile
offender. I didn’t believe that he carefully analyzed the pencil’s
use as a weapon. It was there and he used it. e killer turned out
to be an inexperienced sixteen-year-old who had gone to her
house trying to get a contribution to a walkathon in which he
was not actually participating.
e key feature of this crime scene was that all behavioral
evidence suggested to me an offender who was unsure of himself.
An ex-con attacking an elderly woman in her home would be
very sure of himself. Merely picking up on a single piece of
evidence (such as the African American hair in the Francine
Elveson case) doesn’t give the entire picture. In fact, in the Anna
Berliner murder, it could have led in just the opposite direction
from the truth.
e most difficult question any of us in this business are asked
has to do with whether a particular individual is, or will be,
dangerous. For psychiatrists, it’s often posed in terms of “a threat
to himself for others.”
Around 1986, the FBI was contacted about a roll of film sent
in from Colorado to a photo lab for developing. e pictures
depicted a man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in
camouflage gear, posed on the tailgate of his 4X4 with his rifle
and a Barbie doll that he had subjected to various tortures and
mutilations. No law had been broken in doing this, and I said
that the guy would not have a criminal record. But I also warned
that at his age, this fantasy he was acting out with the doll would
not be satisfying much longer. It would evolve. Just from the
photographs, I didn’t know how important it would be in his
life, but for him to have gone to the care and trouble he did, it
must have had some important significance. I said that this guy
should be watched and interviewed, because this was a case of
dangerousness waiting to happen. I’m not sure if most
psychiatrists would have had the same perspective.
As strange as this incident may sound, I can think of several
“Barbie doll cases” brought to me over the years, all involving
adult men. One subject out in the midwest would stick pins in
every inch of the doll and leave it on the grounds of the local
psychiatric hospital. Occasionally you get this kind of thing with
satanic cults, voodoo, or people who think they’re into
witchcraft, but there was none of that here. Nor did he attach a
name to the doll, indicating an orientation to a particular person.
is was a general sadistic tendency, characteristic of someone
who has a real problem with women.
What else can we say about this individual? We can say that
he has probably experimented with torturing small animals and
may do it regularly. He will have difficulty dealing with people
his own age, either men or women. When he was growing up, he
would have been a bully or sadistic with younger, smaller
children. And he either has or will soon reach the stage in which
acting out his fantasies on a doll won’t be enough. You can argue
about whether or not he’s “sick,” but sick or not, I can tell you I’d
have a real concern about his dangerousness.
So when is this dangerous behavior likely to occur? is guy is
an inadequate loser. In his mind, everyone’s out to get him and
no one recognizes his talents. If the stressors in his life become
unbearable, that’s when he’ll go one step further with his fantasy.
And with a doll mutilator, one step further doesn’t equal going
after someone in his age group, it means going after someone
younger, weaker, or lamer. He’s a coward. He’s not going to go
after a peer.
at doesn’t mean he’s going to go for children necessarily.
Barbie is portrayed as a mature, developed woman, not a
prepubescent girl. No matter how warped this guy is, what he
desires is contact with a mature woman. If he’s mutilating or
abusing a baby doll, we’ve got another set of problems.
And yet the guy who’s sticking pins in the doll and leaving it
at the hospital is going to be fairly dysfunctional, he won’t have a
driver’s license, he’ll stand out in a crowd as being weird. e guy
in camouflage is going to be much more dangerous. He’s got a
job because he has money for his rifle, his truck, a camera. He
can get around and function “normally” in society. e minute
he snaps, someone’s in real trouble. Do I trust most psychiatrists
or health-care professionals to make this distinction? No. ey
just don’t have the background or the orientation for it. ey
haven’t verified their findings.
One of the key features of our serial-killer study was the idea
of verifying what people told us by studying tangible evidence.
Otherwise, you’re relying on self-reporting, which is incomplete
at best and scientifically meaningless at worst.
•••
e evaluation of dangerousness has many uses and applications.
On Friday, April 16, 1982, U.S. Secret Service agents met with
me about a series of letters written by the same individual
beginning in February 1979, threatening the life of the president
(the first one targeted Jimmy Carter, all the others Ronald
Reagan) and other political figures.
e first letter had been sent to the Secret Service in New
York, from “Lonely and Depressed.” It was two pages long,
handwritten on notebook paper, and threatened to “shoot and
kill President Carter or someone else who has power.”
Between July 1981 and February 1982, eight more letters
followed. ree were sent to the Secret Service in New York, one
to the FBI in New York, one to the FBI in Washington, one to
the Philadelphia Daily News, and two directly to the White
House. ey were handwritten by the same hand as “Lonely and
Depressed,” but these were all signed “C.A.T.” ey were mailed
from New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. e letters
expressed C.A.T.’s intent to kill President Reagan, who was
variously referred to as “the evil of God” and “the Devil.” Other
politicians who supported President Reagan were also threatened.
e writer also made references to John Hinckley, promising to
carry out his failed mission.
ere were more letters, with the mailing list expanded to
Congressman Jack Kemp and Sen. Alfonse D’Amato. Of
particular concern to the Secret Service was the inclusion of
photographs of Senator D’Amato and Congressman Raymond
McGrath of New York City. Taken at very close range, they
demonstrated C.A.T.’s ability to get close enough to carry out his
threats.
Finally, on June 14, 1982, the fourteenth letter was sent to the
editor of the New York Post. It declared that everyone would
know who he was after he did away with the president, whom he
referred to as “the Devil.” He claimed that no one listened to him
and everyone laughed at him, none of which surprised me.
But within the text of this communication he also gave the
newspaper “permission” to talk to him after he had completed his
historic mission. is was the opening we were looking for.
C.A.T. was willing, probably eager, to engage in a dialogue with a
newspaper editor. We would supply one.
From the language and usage in the letters, as well as where
they were sent and to whom, I was pretty sure this guy was from
New York City. I profiled a single white male in his mid-twenties
to early thirties, a native New Yorker living on the outskirts of
the city, probably alone. He would be of average intelligence with
a high school diploma and maybe some further courses in
political science and literature and was probably the youngest or
only son in his family. I suspect that in the past, he was heavily
into drugs and/or alcohol, but now would be only an occasional
user. He would see himself as a failure, having never fulfilled the
dreams his parents or others had set for him, and had a lifelong
list of incomplete tasks and goals. In his early to mid-twenties I
expected him to have been psychologically taxed by an
uncontrollable stress, perhaps related to military service, divorce,
illness, or loss of a family member.
ere was a lot of speculation about what “C.A.T.” stood for
or symbolized. I told the Secret Service not to spend too much
time worrying about that, since it might not mean anything at
all. ere is often a tendency to read too much into every detail
when, in fact, the UNSUB might just like the sound of it or the
way it looked written out.
e issue for the Secret Service, as it always is, was whether or
not this guy was actually dangerous since a lot of people who
make threats and spout in letters would never follow through.
But I told them that personalities like this one are always
searching for something. ey turn to political groups and cults,
but don’t find it. Other people think they’re weird and don’t take
them seriously, so the problem worsens as time goes by. ey
focus on a mission to give their lives some meaning. is is the
first time he’s felt any control, and he likes the feeling, which will
lead him to take frequent and greater chances. People who take
chances are dangerous.
I thought he would be familiar with weapons and prefer closerange assault, even though that would mean he couldn’t get away.
Because his mission might be suicidal, he’d be keeping a diary for
posterity, so the world would know his story. Unlike a personality
like the Tylenol poisoner, C.A.T. doesn’t want to be anonymous.
When the fear of life becomes greater than the fear of death, he
will perpetrate his act of violence. He will seem very calm just
prior to his act. He will camouflage himself and blend into his
surroundings. He will chat with police or Secret Service agents
nearby, and he will seem ordinary and nonthreatening.
In certain ways, he was the same type as John Hinckley, whose
case and trial were much in the news. He also seemed fixated on
Hinckley, about whom we knew a fair amount. I thought he
might want to hear the trial verdict or sentence and suggested to
the Secret Service that at that time, they go to Ford’s eatre in
Washington, where Abraham Lincoln had been shot and where
Hinckley visited before he shot President Reagan. I also told
them to watch the nearby hotel where Hinckley had stayed. If
anyone requested Hinckley’s room, that could very well be him.
e hotel did report a request for that specific room. Secret
Service agents swooped in and raided an elderly couple who had
spent their wedding night in that room and had been back many
times since.
In August, the Secret Service got two more letters signed
“C.A.T.” addressed to the “Office of the President, Washington,
D.C.” ese were both postmarked from Bakers-field, California.
Since a lot of assassins travel around the country stalking their
prey, there was real concern that the guy might be on the move.
In these letters he said, “Being of sound mind & Sound Body [I]
am taking it upon myself to organize as many United States
Citizens as I can, to bear arms, and exterminate from my
country, the enemies from within.”
In a long, paranoid rambling, he talked about the “torture &
Hell” he had been through and acknowledged the possibility that
he could be killed “in my attemps to bring to Justice the scumb
at the top.”
I went through these letters carefully and concluded we were
dealing with a copycat. For one thing, these were written in
script rather than the block capitals of the earlier letters. ey
referred to President Reagan as “Ron” rather than “the Devil” or
“the Old Man.” I thought it likely the writer was a woman, and
as unpleasant as the sentiments and threats expressed were, I did
not think this individual would be dangerous.
e real C.A.T. was a different story. I thought a “tactical
stall” would be the best approach, engaging him in a dialogue
until we could locate him. We cast a Secret Service agent as the
newspaper editor and briefed him on how to seem and what to
say. I emphasized that he should try to get C.A.T. to open up to
him so that his “full story” could be told. Once the level of trust
was built up, the “editor” should suggest that they meet, but
make it late at night, someplace out of the way, because the
editor was even more concerned than C.A.T. about keeping it
secret.
We placed a carefully constructed classified ad in the New
York Post, which C.A.T. answered. He began having regular
conversations with our man. I thought he’d be calling from some
large public facility such as Grand Central or Pennsylvania
Station, or possibly one of the libraries or museums.
Around this time, the FBI got another evaluation from Dr.
Murray Miron, the noted psycholinguistics expert at Syracuse
University. Murray and I had collaborated on research and
articles on threat assessment, and I thought he was one of the
best in the business. After the telephone dialogue began, Murray
wrote an analysis for the FBI stating he no longer considered
C.A.T. dangerous, but instead, a publicity-seeking fraud who was
getting off on manipulating all of these important people.
Murray certainly thought he ought to be caught, but didn’t see
him as the threat I did.
Gradually, we were able to keep him on the phone long
enough to establish a trap and trace. On October 21, 1982, a
combined Secret Service-FBI team picked him up in a phone
booth in Penn Station while he was talking to the “editor.” His
name was Alphonse Amodio Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old, white,
native New Yorker with a high school education.
FBI and Secret Service agents went to his cramped, roachinfested apartment in Floral Park. e family seemed quite
dysfunctional, and when Mrs. Amodio was interviewed, her
description of her son matched the profile. “He hates it [the
world] and feels it hates him,” she told the agents. She described
his violent mood swings. He had been clipping newspaper stories
for years and had filled two filing cabinets with folders labeled
with the names of various politicians. As a child, he had had such
a bad stutter that it had held him back from starting school. He
had joined the Army but went AWOL after basic training. Other
than several diary references to himself as an “alley cat,” the
agents could find no logic or explanation for the C.A.T. moniker.
Amodio was placed in the psychiatric lockup at Bellevue.
Before his trial, U.S. District Court judge David Edelstein
requested an evaluation from a psychiatric social worker, who
found the defendant severely emotionally ill and therefore a
serious danger to the president and other government officials.
Amodio did confess to being C.A.T. Agents questioning him
could find no political component to his thinking. He just did it
for the power and attention.
He is no longer institutionalized. Is this type of person still
dangerous? I don’t think he would be an immediate threat, but if
the stressors built up again and there was no way for him to
cope, I would begin getting nervous again.
What do I look for? One of the key things is tone. If I see a
series of letters to a politician, a movie star, an athlete, or any
celebrity in which the tone becomes increasingly rigid and urgent
(“You’re not answering my letters!”), I take them seriously. It
becomes mentally and physically exhausting to maintain that
obsessive-compulsive rigidity. In time, the individual will begin
to break down. Again, you can call behavior a form of mental
illness, but what I have to concern myself with is how dangerous
it may be.
•••
ough we have interviewed women such as attempted assassins
and Manson family sympathizers Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme
and Sarah Jane Moore, our published prison study only involved
men. While you find the occasional woman assassin type, you
will note that every case of serial murder or lust killing I’ve
mentioned involves a male offender. Our research has shown that
virtually all serial killers come from dysfunctional backgrounds of
sexual or physical abuse, drugs or alcoholism, or any of the
related problems. Women come from these same backgrounds,
and if anything, girls are even more subject to abuse and
molestation than boys. So why do so few of them grow up to
commit the same kinds of crimes as the men? A female serial
killer suspect such as Aileen Wuornos, accused of killing men on
interstates in Florida, is so rare as to be instantly noteworthy.
For this subject we’re on shakier ground, because there simply
haven’t been the studies to answer this question definitively. As
some have speculated, it may be related directly to testosterone
levels and otherwise hormonally and chemically based. e only
thing we can say with an experiential authority is that women
seem to internalize their stressors. Rather than lashing out at
others, they tend to punish themselves through such things as
alcoholism, drugs, prostitution, and suicide. Some may repeat
the psychological or physical abuse within their own families, as
the mother of Ed Kemper appears to have done. From a mental
health viewpoint, this is very damaging. But the fact remains,
women do not kill in the same way or in anywhere remotely near
the numbers men do.
So what can be done about dangerousness? How can we
intervene in cases of mental instability or character defect before
it’s too late? Unfortunately, there’s no quick or simple answer. In
many instances, law enforcement has become the front line of
order and discipline, rather than the family. is is a dangerous
situation for society to be in, because by the time we enter, it’s
too late to do any good. e best we can do is to keep more bad
from happening.
If you’re asking the schools to be the answer, you’re also asking
a lot. If you take a kid from a bad background and expect the
overburdened teachers to turn him around in seven hours a day,
it might or might not happen. What about the other seventeen
hours in a day?
People often ask us if, through our research and experience,
we can now predict which children are likely to become
dangerous in later life. Roy Hazelwood’s answer is, “Sure. But so
can any good elementary school teacher.” And if we can get them
treatment early enough and intensively enough, it might make a
difference. A significant role-model adult during the formative
years can make a world of difference.
Bill Tafoya, the special agent who served as our “futurist” at
Quantico, advocated a minimum of a ten-year commitment of
money and resources on the magnitude of what we sent into the
Persian Gulf. He calls for a wide-scale reinstatement of Project
Head Start, one of the most effective long-term, anticrime
programs in history. He doesn’t think more police are the answer,
but he would bring in “an army of social workers” to provide
assistance for battered women, homeless families with children,
to find good foster homes. And he would back it all up with tax
incentive programs.
I’m not sure this is the total answer, but it would certainly be
an important start. Because the sad fact is, the shrinks can battle
all they want, and my people and I can use psychology and
behavioral science to help catch the criminals, but by the time we
get to use our stuff, the severe damage has already been done.
19
Sometimes the Dragon Wins
When the body of a sixteen-year-old girl was found in the Green
River outside Seattle in July of 1982, no one thought too much
about it. e river, linking Mount Rainier with Puget Sound,
was a popular illegal dump site, and the victim was a young
prostitute. e significance of the find didn’t become apparent to
police until later that summer—another woman was found dead
in the river on August 12, with three more discovered three days
later. e ages and races of the victims differed, but all were
suffocated. Some were weighted down in an apparent effort to
keep them hidden. All were undressed, and in two cases, small
rocks were found inside the victim’s vagina.
Now, the serial nature of the crimes was unavoidable and
brought back haunting reminders of Seattle’s last serial murders,
the kidnapping and killing of at least eight women in the area in
1974 by a subject known only as “Ted.” ose cases had
remained unsolved for four years until a handsome, articulate
young man named eodore Robert Bundy was arrested for a
brutal series of sorority-house murders in Florida. By that time,
he had worked his way across the country, killing at least twentythree young women and earning himself a permanent place in
the chamber of horrors of our collective psyche.
Maj. Richard Kraske of the King County Criminal
Investigations Division had been in charge of that investigation,
and wanting to apply what he had learned, he now turned to the
FBI for assistance in developing a psychological profile of the
“Green River Killer.” Although the investigators on the newly
formed, multijurisdictional task force were divided over whether
all the cases were really linked, there was one clear common
factor: all the dead women were prostitutes who worked the SeaTac Strip, the Pacific Coast Highway near Seattle-Tacoma
International Airport. And now, more young women were
missing.
In September, Allen Whitaker, the Seattle SAC, was at
Quantico for an in-service and presented us with a detailed
package on the five original cases. As I often did when I wanted
to be able to concentrate away from constant staff and phone
interruptions, I sequestered myself on the top floor of the library,
where I could be alone, stare out the window (always a pleasant
novelty for those of us who work underground), and get myself
into the minds of the offender and the victims. I spent about a
day looking through the materials—crime-scene reports and
photos, autopsy protocols, victim descriptions. Despite the
variances in age and race and MO, the similarities were strong
enough to indicate all the murders were committed by the same
subject.
I developed a detailed profile of a physically powerful,
inadequate, underemployed white male, comfortable with the
river, who felt no remorse for what he was doing. Quite the
contrary, he was a man on a mission who’d had humiliating
experiences with women and was now out to punish as many as
he could of what he considered to be the lowest of them. But at
the same time, I warned the police that because of the nature of
the crimes and the victims, many people would fit this profile.
Unlike an Ed Kemper, say, this was no mental giant. ese were
unsophisticated, high-risk crimes. e emphasis had to be on
proactive techniques that would lure the UNSUB into some type
of contact with the police. Whitaker took the profile back with
him when he left Quantico.
Later that month the badly decomposed body of another
young woman was found in an area of condemned houses near
the airport. She was nude, with a pair of men’s black socks tied
around her neck. e medical examiner estimated she’d been
killed around the same time as the river victims. Perhaps the
killer had changed his MO after hearing about surveillance of the
river.
As detailed in e Search for the Green River Killer, a carefully
researched account by Carlton Smith and omas Guillen, the
strongest suspect was a forty-four-year-old taxi driver who
matched the profile in virtually every way, He’d injected himself
into the investigation early, calling police with tips on how to
find the killer and advising them to look for other taxi drivers.
He spent a lot of time with prostitutes and street people along
the Strip, was nocturnal, drove around compulsively, drank and
smoked as the profile suggested the UNSUB would, and
professed concern for the prostitutes’ safety. He had five failed
marriages, grew up near the river, lived with his widower father,
drove an older, conservative car that wasn’t well maintained, and
followed the press on the case closely.
Police scheduled him for an interview in September and called
me for a strategy. I was traveling at a feverish pace then, hopping
around the country on an almost weekly basis trying to keep up
with my cases. When the police called, I happened to be out of
town. ey spoke to Roger Depue, the unit chief, who said I
would be back in a few days and strongly suggested they wait to
conduct the interview until they’d had a chance to talk to me.
us far, the subject had been cooperative and wasn’t planning to
leave the area.
But the police went ahead with the interview, which lasted an
entire day and turned into a confrontation. From a perspective of
twenty-twenty hindsight, perhaps it could have been done
differently, Polygraph results were ambiguous, and even though
the police put him under bumper-lock surveillance and
continued gathering circumstantial evidence, they could never
make a case against him.
Not personally having been involved in that part of the
investigation, I can’t say whether or not this individual was a
promising suspect. But this lack of coordination and focus
greatly hampered the investigation in the early stages, when a
subject is usually most catchable. He’s concerned, he doesn’t
know what to expect, the “ass-pucker factor” is at its highest. As
time goes by and the UNSUB realizes he’s getting away with it,
he becomes more comfortable. He settles down, refines his MO.
At the beginning of this case, local police didn’t even have a
computer. And as the investigation grew, at the rate they were
processing leads, it would have taken fifty years to evaluate
properly what they had. Were a Green River type of investigation
launched today, I hope and trust the early organization would be
more efficient and the strategy more defined. Still, the task would
be formidable. ese prostitutes lived a nomadic existence.
Oftentimes, when a boyfriend or pimp would report one
missing, she had disappeared on purpose or simply relocated to
another area up or down the coast. Many of them used aliases,
making identification of bodies and tracking of cases a
nightmare. Medical and dental records were therefore hard to
locate and authenticate. And relations and cooperation between
police and the prostitute community are always tenuous at best.
In May 1983, a young prostitute was found fully clothed in a
carefully staged scene: a fish was placed across her throat, another
on her left breast, and a wine bottle between her legs. She had
been strangled with a thin cord or rope. e police chalked her
death up to the Green River Killer. But while I thought the last
victim found on land had been related, this one struck me as
more of a personal-cause homicide. is one wasn’t random.
ere was too much anger here. e killer knew this victim well.
Nearing the end of 1983, the body count had risen to twelve,
with seven more reported missing. One of the dead women had
been eight months pregnant. e task force asked me to come
out and give them on-scene advice. As I’ve mentioned, I was
trying to handle various stages of the Wayne Williams case in
Atlanta, the .22-Caliber Killer in Buffalo, the Trailside Killer in
San Francisco, the Robert Hansen case in Anchorage, an antiSemitic serial arsonist in Hartford, and more than a hundred
other active cases. e only way I could keep up with them all
was to force myself to dream about them at night. I knew I was
running myself ragged. I just didn’t know how ragged, how fast.
And when the Green River Task Force said they needed me, I
knew I had to squeeze that one in, too.
I was confident my profile would fit the killer, but I also knew
it would fit a lot of people, and more than one of these could be
involved by now. e longer this went on, the greater the chance
for more killers to become involved, either as copycats or simply
because of the territory and the victims. e Sea-Tac Strip was
easy pickings for a killer. If you have a will to kill, that’s the kind
of place you go. e prostitutes were readily available, and since
many of them plied the entire West Coast corridor from
Vancouver all the way down to San Diego, when a girl
disappeared, often she would not be missed.
I thought proactive techniques were more important than
ever. ese could include convening town meetings on the
murders at rural schools, then passing around sign-up sheets and
taking note of license plates of those attending, using the media
to put forth one investigator as “supercop” to lure the killer to
contact him, stories personalizing the pregnant woman to try to
encourage some remorse and revisits from the killer, surveillance
of unpublicized dump sites, use of decoy police officers, and any
number of other possibilities.
I brought Blaine McIlwain and Ron Walker, two of the newer
profilers, on the December trip to Seattle, figuring this would be
a good case to get them some on-site experience. It was a good
thing I did, as if God or some cosmic order had planned it. ey
saved my life.
When they broke through the locked, bolted, and chained
door to my hotel room and found me unconscious and
convulsing on the floor, I was near death from the fever that was
raging through my brain.
By the time I finally recovered and returned to work in May
of 1984, the Green River Killer was still at large, as he is at this
writing more than a decade later. I continued consulting with the
task force, which grew into one of the largest organized
manhunts in American history. e longer the investigation went
on, as the number of bodies continued to grow, I became
increasingly convinced that several killers were at work, all
sharing some similar traits, but each acting on his own. Police in
Spokane and Portland brought me clusters of murdered and
missing prostitutes, but I found no clear connection to the
murders around Seattle. San Diego police thought another
cluster in their city might be related. All in all, the Green River
Task Force was investigating more than fifty deaths. More than
twelve hundred solid suspects had been reduced to about eighty,
ey ranged from boyfriends and pimps of the dead women to a
John in Portland from whom a prostitute had escaped after
threats of torture, to a Seattle-based trapper. At times, even
members of the police force were considered possible suspects.
But none of this was enough for closure. At this point, I’m
convinced there were at least three killers, possibly more.
e last major proactive thrust came in December 1988, with
a two-hour live television program broadcast nationally. Entitled
Manhunt . . . Live and hosted by Dallas star Patrick Duffy, the
show offered background on the search for the killer or killers
and provided a bank of toll-free numbers for viewers to give tips
and leads. I flew out to Seattle to appear on the show and to train
police officers on how to screen calls and quickly ask pertinent
questions.
In the week following the broadcast, the telephone company
estimated that more than one hundred thousand people had
tried to call, but fewer than ten thousand had gotten through.
And after three weeks, there just weren’t the financial resources or
the volunteers to continue manning the crime-stoppers hot lines.
In the end, it was symbolic of so many other aspects of Green
River—many dedicated people expending tremendous effort, but
ultimately, too little, too late.
For years, Gregg McCrary had a cartoon tacked to the
bulletin board in his office. It shows a fire-breathing dragon
standing fiercely over a prostrate knight. e caption reads
simply, “Sometimes the dragon wins.”
is is a reality none of us can ever escape. We don’t catch
them all, and since the ones we do catch have already killed or
raped or tortured or bombed or burned or maimed, none of
them is ever caught soon enough. It’s true today, just as it was
more than a hundred years ago when Jack the Ripper became the
first serial killer to haunt the public imagination.
Ironically, though the Manhunt broadcast didn’t solve the
Green River murders, that same year I appeared on another
national television show in which I did determine through
profiling the possible identity of that most infamous serial killer
of all. It was timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of
Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel murders, which meant my profile
was only a century too late to do any good.
e brutal prostitute murders took place in the gaslit streets
and alleys of Victorian London’s rough and teeming East End
between August 31 and November 9, 1888. Over that time, the
viciousness of the killings and the postmortem mutilation
escalated. In the early morning of September 30, he killed two
women within an hour or two, an unheard-of event at the time.
e police received several taunting letters, which were published
in the newspapers, and the horrors became a huge media event.
e Ripper was never caught, despite the fervent efforts of
Scotland Yard, and his identity has remained a subject of intense
speculation ever since. Like the “true” identity of William
Shakespeare, the choice of suspects often reveals more about the
people doing the speculating than it does about the mystery
itself.
Among the favorite and most fascinating possibilities over the
years has been Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, eldest
grandson of Queen Victoria and, after his father, Edward, the
Prince of Wales (who became Edward VII upon Victoria’s death
in 1901), the next in line to the throne. e Duke of Clarence is
supposed to have died in the great influenza epidemic of 1892,
but many Ripper theorists have him actually dying of syphilis or
possibly poisoning at the hands of a royal physician to remove
the taint of scandal from the monarchy. It’s certainly an
intriguing possibility
Other strong candidates have included Montague John Druit,
a teacher in a boy’s school who matched eyewitness descriptions;
Dr. William Gull, chief royal physician; Aaron Kosminski, a poor
Polish immigrant who’d been in and out of mental asylums in the
area; and Dr. Roslyn D’Onstan, a journalist known to dabble in
black magic.
Much has been made of the fact that the Ripper murders
stopped abruptly, leading to speculation that he might have
taken his own life, that the Duke of Clarence was sent on a royal
trip, that one of the other suspects might have died. Looking
back from our current knowledge, it seems to me just as likely
that he was picked up for some other lesser offense as many are,
and this was what stopped the killing. Another issue was the
“ripping” itself. One of the reasons for the focus on someone
with medical training was the degree of disembowelment of the
later victims.
e aim of e Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper, broadcast
nationally in October 1988, was to present all available evidence
in the case and then have experts from various disciplines present
their analyses about who Jack really was, solving this century-old
riddle “once and for all.” Roy Hazelwood and I were invited to
be on the program, and the FBI thought this would be a good
opportunity to showcase the kind of work we do without
compromising any ongoing investigations or trials. e live, twohour presentation was hosted by British actor, writer, and
director Peter Ustinov, who really got into the mystery as the
drama unfolded.
Now any exercise of this kind has the same rules and strictures
as a current investigation—that is, our product can only be as
good as the evidence and data we have to work with. A hundred
years ago, forensic investigation was primitive by modern
standards. But I thought that, based on what I knew about the
Ripper murders, if such a case were presented to us today, it
would be very solvable, so I thought we ought to take a flyer on
it. When you do the kind of work we do, there is actually some
sport and relaxation when the only thing on the line if you screw
up is making a fool of yourself on national television rather than
having another innocent victim dead.
Before the program aired, I developed a profile as I would for
a modern case, with the same-style heading:
UNSUB; AKA JACK THE RIPPER
SERIES OF HOMICIDES
LONDON, ENGLAND
1888
NCAVC—HOMICIDE
(CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS)
e last line, NCAVC, refers to the National Center for the
Analysis of Violent Crime, the overall program established at
Quantico in 1985 to include the Behavioral Science and
Investigative Support Units, VICAP—the Violent Criminal
Apprehension Program computer database—and other rapidresponse teams and units.
As in a real consultation, once I had come up with the profile,
we were given the possible suspects. As appealing as the Duke of
Clarence was from a dramatic standpoint, after analyzing all the
evidence available, Roy and I independently came up with Aaron
Kosminski as our likeliest candidate.
As in the Yorkshire Ripper case ninety years later, we were
convinced the taunting letters to the police were written by an
impostor, someone other than the “real” Jack. e type of
individual who committed these crimes would not have the
personality to set up a public challenge to the police. e
mutilation suggested a mentally disturbed, sexually inadequate
person with a lot of generalized rage against women. e blitz
style of attack in each case also told us he was personally and
socially inadequate. is was not someone who could hold his
own verbally. e physical circumstances of the crimes told us
that this was someone who could blend in with his surroundings
and not cause suspicion or fear on the part of the prostitutes. He
would be a quiet loner, not a macho butcher, who would prowl
the streets nightly and return to the scenes of his crimes.
Undoubtedly, the police would have interviewed him in their
investigation. Of all the possibilities we were presented,
Kosminski fit the profile far better than any of the others. As for
the supposed medical knowledge needed for the postmortem
mutilation and dissection, this was really nothing but elementary
butchery. And we have long since learned that serial killers need
nothing but will to commit whatever atrocities they want on a
body. Ed Gein, Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Marquette
—to name but a few—were in no way held back by their lack of
medical training.
Having presented this analysis, I now have to backpedal on
my original declaration with the qualification that from this
vantage point a hundred years later, I can’t be sure that Aaron
Kosminski was the Ripper. He was simply one of the ones given
to us. But what I can state with a high degree of confidence is
that Jack the Ripper was someone like Kosminski. Were this
criminal investigative analysis taking place today, our input
would help police and Scotland Yard narrow their focus and
come up with the UNSUB’s identity. at’s why I say that by
modern standards, this case would be very solvable.
•••
In some cases our methods point to a type of suspect, but we
can’t get enough evidence for an arrest and indictment. Such a
case was the “BTK Strangler” in Wichita, Kansas, in the mid1970s.
It began on January 15, 1974, with the murder of the Otero
family, irty-eight-year-old Joseph Otero and his wife, Julie,
were tied and strangled with venetian-blind cords. eir nine-
year-old son, Joseph II, was found tied in his own bedroom, a
plastic bag over his head. Eleven-year-old Josephine was hanging
by her neck from a pipe in the basement ceiling, clad only in a
sweatshirt and socks. All the evidence suggested that this was not
an impulsive act. e telephone lines had been cut and the cord
had been brought to the scene.
Ten months later, a local newspaper editor got an anonymous
call directing him to a book in the public library. Inside was a
note from the UNSUB, claiming credit for the Otero killings,
promising more and explaining that “the code words for me will
be: Bind them, Torture them, Kill them.”
Several more killings of young women followed in the ensuing
three years, after which a letter to a local television station
revealed much about the psyche of this UNSUB, who had
carefully given himself his own nickname: “How many do I have
to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national
attention?”
In one of his published communications, he compared his
work to that of Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Hillside
Strangler—all obscure losers who had become media celebrities
through their crimes. He attributed his deeds to a “demon” and
“factor X,” leading to extensive psychological speculation in the
newspapers about his personality.
But he also included graphic drawings of naked women in
various poses of binding, rape, and torture. ese hideous
drawings were not published, but they gave me a good picture of
the type of person we were looking for. From that, it was only a
matter of narrowing down the suspects.
Like those of his hero, Jack the Ripper, BTK’s murders
stopped abruptly. In this case, though, I believe the police had
interviewed him, he knew they were closing in on him, and he
was intelligent and sophisticated enough to stop before sufficient
evidence could be gathered. I hope we’ve at least neutralized him,
but sometimes the dragon wins.
Sometimes the dragon wins in our own lives as well. When a
murderer kills one person, he takes a lot of victims along with
that individual. I’m not the only one in my unit to lose work
over stress-related problems; far from it. And the instances of
family problems and marital strife are too numerous not to be
worried about.
In 1993, my marriage with Pam broke up after twenty-two
years. We would probably give differing perspectives on what
happened between us, but certain things are undeniable. I was
away much too often when our daughters, Erika and Lauren,
were growing up. When I was in town, I was still so consumed
by what I was doing that Pam often felt like a single parent. She
had to run the house, pay the bills, get the kids to school, meet
with the teachers, make sure the homework got done, all the
while keeping up with her own teaching career. By the time our
son, Jed, was born in January of 1987, we had other profilers
working with me and I wasn’t spending as much time on the
road. But I have to admit, I have three bright, loving, charming,
wonderful children, and I don’t think I really got to know them
well until shortly before I retired from the Bureau. I spent so
much time over the years learning about the victimology of dead
children that I shortchanged and didn’t learn enough about my
own brilliantly alive ones.
Many times Pam would come to me with some typical minor
problem involving one of the kids, say a cut or scrape from
falling off a bike. With all the stress and pressure I felt, we both
remember how often I would lash out, describing the mutilated
bodies of kids the same age that I had seen, and didn’t she realize
that a fall off a bike was normal and nothing to get charged up
about?
You try never to fully desensitize yourself from the horrible
stuff, but you find yourself building up immunity against
anything that’s less than horrible. One time I was eating dinner
with the kids while Pam was opening a package in the kitchen.
e knife slipped and she cut herself badly. She screamed and we
all came rushing in. But as soon as I saw that the injury wasn’t
threatening to life or limb, I remember how interesting I found
the blood-spatter pattern to be and began mentally correlating it
to spatter patterns I’d seen at murder scenes. I was joking around,
trying to diffuse the tension. I started pointing out to her and the
children how we saw a different pattern every time she moved
her hand, and that was one of the ways we could tell what
happened between an attacker and a victim. But I don’t think the
rest of them took it as casually as I did.
You try to develop defense mechanisms to deal with what you
see on the job, but you can easily end up coming off as a cool,
aloof son of a bitch. If your family’s intact and your marriage is
solid, you can put up with a lot of what you face at work. But if
there are any weaknesses at home, various stressors can magnify
everything, just as they do for the people we hunt.
Pam and I ended up with different friends. I couldn’t talk
about what I did in her circle, so I needed my own kind around
me. And when we socialized outside Bureau or law enforcement
circles, I often found myself bored by the mundane concerns
discussed. As cold as it sounds, when you spend your days
getting inside the heads of killers, where the neighbor puts his
trash can or what color he paints his fence just isn’t all that
stimulating.
I am glad to say, though, after a period in which we both went
through the emotional wringer, that Pam and I are now good
friends. e kids live with me (Erika is off at college), but Pam
and I are together much of the time, and we both now take an
equal role as parents. I’m grateful Lauren and Jed are still young
enough for me to enjoy some of their growing-up years.
•••
From a lonely position in the early 1980s in which I was the
entire full-time FBI profiling staff—assisted as their time
permitted by Roy Hazelwood, Bill Hagmaier, and a few others—
the unit grew to more than ten. at’s still not enough to handle
the volume of cases we’re presented, but it’s probably just about
as large as we could be and still maintain the personal contact
with each other and the local departments that has become the
hallmark of our own modus operandi. Many of the police chiefs
and detectives who call on the unit first met us in National
Academy classes. Sheriff Jim Metts contacted me to help find
Shari Smith’s and Debra Helmick’s murderer, and Capt. Lynde
Johnston called on Gregg McCrary to help determine who was
slaughtering prostitutes in Rochester because they were both
National Academy graduates.
By the mid-1980s, Behavioral Science had been divided up
into the Behavioral Science Instruction and Research Unit, and
the group I worked for as criminal-personality profiling program
manager, the Behavioral Science Investigative Support Unit. e
other two key divisions besides mine in Investigative Support
were VICAP, which Jim Wright had taken over from Bob Ressler,
and Engineering Services. Roger Depue was chief of Instruction
and Research and Alan “Smokey” Burgess was chief of
Investigative Support. (He is not related to Ann Burgess, but her
husband, Allen Burgess, was our coauthor on the Crime
Classification Manual. Got it?)
As taxing and challenging as my job was in many ways, I had
managed to establish a prominent and satisfying career for
myself. Fortunately, I’d been able to avoid the step virtually
everyone else who wants to get ahead in the organization has to
take—administration. at changed in the spring of 1990. We
were having a unit meeting when Smokey Burgess announced he
was retiring as unit chief. Later, the new deputy assistant director,
Dave Kohl, who’d been my squad supervisor in Milwaukee and a
fellow member of the SWAT team, called me into his office and
asked me my intentions.
I told him I was so burned out and fed up with everything
that I was thinking of applying for a desk job uptown in violent
crime and finishing out my career that way.
“You don’t want to do that,” Kohl told me. “You’ll lose
yourself up there. You can make a much greater contribution as
unit chief.”
“I don’t know if I want to be unit chief,” I told him. I was
already performing a lot of the unit-chief functions and acting as
institutional memory because I’d been there so long. But at this
stage of my career, I didn’t want to get bogged down in
administration. Burgess was an excellent administrator, adept at
running interference so that those of us who worked for him
could do our jobs effectively,
“I want you to be unit chief,” Kohl announced. He’s a
dynamic, hard-charging, aggressive type.
I said I wanted to continue doing cases, trial strategy, court
testimony, and public speaking. at’s what I thought I was good
at. Kohl assured me I’d be able to and nominated me for the job.
My first act as unit chief, as I’ve said many times, was to “get
rid of the BS” by getting rid of “Behavioral Science” in our name
and calling it, simply, the Investigative Support Unit. I wanted to
give our local police clients and the rest of the FBI a clear
message about where we were—and were not—coming from.
With the help and unending support of Roberta Beadle, who
was in charge of personnel, I got VICAP staffing from four up to
sixteen. e rest of the unit grew, too, and soon we were up to a
total complement of about forty people. To relieve some of the
administrative burden created by our new size, I instituted a
regional management program in which individual agents would
be responsible for a specific region of the country.
I thought these people all deserved to be GS-14s, but
headquarters was only willing to give us four or five 14 slots. So I
got them to agree that as each one got through a two-year
specialized training program, they would each be “anointed” as
experts and recognized as supervisory special agents entitled to
that rating and pay. e program involved auditing all National
Academy Behavioral Science Unit-taught courses, taking two
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology courses, working on
psychiatry and law at the University of Virginia (Park Dietz was
there at the time), attending John Reed’s interrogation school,
studying death investigation with the Baltimore Medical
Examiner’s Office, riding with NYPD homicide units, and
writing profiles under one of the regional managers.
We also did much more international work than ever before.
In the last year before he retired, for instance, Gregg McCrary
worked major serial murders in both Canada and Austria.
Functionally, the unit ran well. Administratively, I ran
something of a loose ship, which is merely a function of my
personality. When I would see someone burning out, I’d go
around the rules and regulations, sign them out, or tell them to
take some time off. Ultimately, they would be much more
efficient than if I had them working by the rule book. When
you’ve got top people and you can’t reward them monetarily, you
have to help them out in other ways.
I also always got along well with the support staff, and when I
retired, they seemed the most sorry to see me go. is probably
goes back to my time in the Air Force. So many of the leaders in
the Bureau were military officers (and many, like my last SAC,
Robin Montgomery, were decorated war heroes) that they
approached things from an officer’s perspective. ere’s nothing
wrong with this, and large organizations would function less
smoothly if most of the administrators were like me. But I was an
enlisted man and so always identified emotionally with the
support people. I was therefore a lot more likely to get the help I
needed than some of the other chiefs.
A lot of people think of the FBI the same way they used to
think of IBM: a huge bureaucratic organization of bright and
accomplished, though interchangeable, humorless men and
women in white shirts and dark suits. But I’ve been fortunate
enough to be part of a small group of truly unique individuals,
each of whom is a standout in his or her own right. As time went
by and behavioral science’s role in law enforcement grew, we all
naturally developed our own special interests and fields of
expertise.
From the early days of our study, Bob Ressler pursued
research while I devoted myself to the operational side. Roy
Hazelwood is the expert on rape and lust murder. Ken Lanning is
the leading authority on crimes against children. Jim Reese
started off in profiling but found his great contribution to be
made in the field of stress and stress management for police
officers and federal agents. He has a Ph.D. in the field, has
written extensively, and is sought after for his counseling ability
throughout the law enforcement community, Once he came into
the unit, Jim Wright not only took on the training of new
profilers but also became the leading authority on stalking, one
of the fastest growing of the serious interpersonal crimes. And
each of us has developed many, many personal relationships with
field offices, police departments, sheriff’s offices, and state
agencies around the country so that when someone calls for help,
he or she knows and trusts whom they’re talking to.
It’s sometimes daunting for the new people coming into the
unit, trying to blend in with all these “stars,” especially after the
film e Silence of the Lambs came out and such intense national
interest was focused on what we do. But we try to assure them
that the reason they were selected is because we feel they have
what it takes to be full and equal members of the team. ey all
come from strong investigative backgrounds, and once they’re
with us, we put them through a full two years of on-the-job
training. Add to that their intelligence, intuition, diligence,
integrity, and self-confidence, together with an equal capacity to
listen to and evaluate other people’s points of view. From my
perspective, one of the things that has made the FBI Academy
the premier institution of its kind in the world is that it is made
up of individuals, each pursuing his or her own interests and
talents for a common purpose. And each of those individuals, in
turn, encourages the same qualities in others. I hope and trust
that the collegial and mutually supportive system we set up in
the unit will survive as we first-generation people retire.
At my retirement dinner at Quantico in June 1995, a lot of
people had nice things to say about me, which I found both
humbling and extremely moving. Frankly, I was prepared for a
real roast and figured all my people would use this last official
chance to dump everything on me they’d been saving up. I ran
into Jud Ray in the men’s room afterward, and he was already
expressing regret at having held off. Once they’d blown their
opportunity, though, and it was my turn to speak, I felt no
obligation to restrain myself and let loose with all the zingers I’d
armed myself with in anticipation of what they’d say. I had no
particular wisdom or serious advice to impart that night; I just
hope I’ve managed to strike a chord by the example I’ve tried to
set.
Since my retirement, I’ve gone back to Quantico to teach and
consult, and my colleagues know I’m always available to them. I
continue to lecture and speak as I always have, giving the
perspective of my twenty-five years of experience delving into the
mind of murder. I’ve retired from the FBI, but I don’t think I’ll
ever truly be able to stop what it is I’ve trained to do.
Unfortunately, ours is very much a growth industry, and we’ll
never run out of customers.
People often ask me what can be done about our horrendous
violent-crime statistics. While there are definitely practical things
that can and should be done, I believe that the only chance of
solving our crime problem is if enough people want to. More
police and more courts and more prisons and better investigative
techniques are fine, but the only way crime is going to go down
is if all of us simply stop accepting and tolerating it in our
families, our friends, and our associates. is is the lesson from
other countries with far lower numbers than ours. Only this type
of grassroots solution, in my opinion, will be effective. Crime is a
moral problem. It can only be resolved on a moral level.
In all my years of research and dealing with violent offenders,
I’ve never yet come across one who came from what I would
consider a good background and functional, supportive family
unit. I believe that the vast majority of violent offenders are
responsible for their conduct, made their choices, and should
face the consequences of what they do. It’s ridiculous to say that
someone doesn’t appreciate the seriousness of what he’s done
because he’s only fourteen or fifteen. At eight, my son, Jed, has
already known for years what’s right and what’s wrong.
But twenty-five years of observation has also told me that
criminals are more “made” than “born,” which means that
somewhere along the line, someone who provided a profound
negative influence could have provided a profound positive one
instead. So what I truly believe is that along with more money
and police and prisons, what we most need more of is love. is
is not being simplistic; it’s at the very heart of the issue.
•••
Not too long ago, I was invited to speak before the New York
chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. e talk was well
attended and the reception was warm and cordial. ese men
and women who made their living writing stories about murder
and mayhem were acutely interested in hearing from someone
who had worked thousands of actual cases. In fact, ever since
omas Harris and e Silence of the Lambs, writers and
newspeople and filmmakers have been coming to us for the “real
story.”
But what I quickly realized as I related the details of some of
my more interesting and graphic cases was that many people in
the audience were turning off and tuning out. ey were getting
seriously grossed out by hearing about the things that my people
and I saw every day. I saw that they had no interest in hearing the
details, at the same moment that it must have dawned on them
that they didn’t want to write about it like it really was. Fair
enough. We each have our own clienteles.
e dragon doesn’t always win, and we’re doing whatever we
can to see to it that he wins less and less. But the evil he
represents, the thing I’ve confronted throughout my career, isn’t
going to go away, and somebody has to tell the real story. at’s
what I’ve tried to do here, just as I’ve lived it.
POCKET STAR BOOKS
PROUDLY PRESENTS
JOURNEY INTO
DARKNESS
JOHN DOUGLAS
AND MARK OLSHAKER
Available in Paperback
from
Pocket Books
e following is a preview of
Journey Into Darkness . . .
In the Mind of a Killer
is isn’t the Hollywood version. It isn’t sanitized or prettied up
or rendered into “art.” is is the way it really happens. If
anything, it’s worse than the way I describe it.
As I had so many times before, I put myself in the mind of the killer.
I don’t know who she’s gonna be, but I’m ready to kill
someone. Right now.
My wife’s left me alone for the whole evening, gone out to a
Tupperware party with her girlfriends rather than spending the
time with me. It probably doesn’t matter all that much; we’ve
been fighting all the time anyway and we’d been fighting all day.
Still, it’s depressing and I’m sick and tired of being treated that
way. Maybe she’s really out seeing other men like my first wife’d
done. She got hers, though—ended up facedown in the bathtub
gagging on her own puke. Served her right for the way she
treated me. Our two kids ended up with my folks; that’s another
thing pisses me off—like I wasn’t good enough to take care of
them anymore.
I sit around watching TV for a while by myself, drinking beer,
a couple of six-packs, then a fifth of wine. But I still feel bad. I
keep sinking lower. I need more beer or something else to drink.
What’s it now—9:00, 9:30 maybe—I get up and drive to the
mini-mart near the commissary and get another six-pack of
Moose Head. en I drive down to Armour Road and just sit
there drinking the beer, trying to sort things out in my own
mind.
e longer I’m sitting here, the more depressed I’m getting.
I’m here alone, living on the base as a dependent to my own wife,
they’re all her friends, no friends of my own, don’t even have my
kids. I was in the Navy myself, you know, and thought it was
gonna work out, but it didn’t. Now it’s just one dead-end job
after another. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Maybe I should
just go on home and wait, then have it out with her when she
comes back, get some things settled. It’s all running through my
head at the same time. I’d really like to have someone to talk to
right now, but there isn’t anyone around. Hell, I don’t know
anyone to tell my problems to, anyhow.
It’s dark all around. It’s starting to feel . . . kind of inviting. I
feel one with the night. e dark makes me anonymous. e
dark makes me omnipotent.
I’m over on the north side of the base, parked on the side of
the road, still drinking beer, just past the buffalo pens when I see
her. Shit, some buffaloes get better treatment than I do.
She’s just crossed from one side of the road to the other. She’s
jogging on the side of the road, all by herself, even though it’s
already dark out. She’s tall and really good-looking, about twenty,
I’d say, with long brownish blond hair hanging in a braid. Her
forehead glistens with sweat in the moonlight. Yep, very pretty.
She has on a red T-shirt with the Marine emblem in gold on the
front and little red shorts that show off her ass real nice and make
her legs look like they go on forever. Not an ounce of fat on her.
ose Marine women keep themselves in real great shape. All
that exercise and drilling. Not like the ones in the Navy. ey
could whip an ordinary man’s ass if given half the chance.
I watch her for a few moments, her boobs bouncing up and
down with the rhythm of her run. I’m thinking about getting out
to run with her, maybe strike up a conversation. But I know I’m
not near in the shape she’s in. Besides, I’m dead fucking drunk.
So maybe I pull up in the car, offer her a ride back to her
barracks or something, get her to talk to me that way.
But then I’m thinking to myself, what’s she gonna go with
someone like me for when she’s probably doing those hotshot
Marines? Girl like that thinks she’s too good to give my type the
time of day. No matter what I say, she’s gonna blow me off. And
I been blown off enough for one day already. I been blown off
enough for one lifetime.
Well, I’m not putting up with any of that bullshit anymore—
not tonight, anyway. Whatever I want, I’m just gonna take; that’s
the only way you get anything in this world. Bitch is gonna have
to deal with me whether she likes it or not.
I start up the car and pull alongside her. I lean across the
passenger window and call out, “ ’Scuse me! Do you know how
far it is back to the other side of the base?”
She doesn’t seem scared or nothing—I guess ’cause of the base
sticker on the car, plus the fact that she probably thinks she can
take care of herself, being a Marine and all.
She stops, comes over to the car real trusting like, breathing a
little heavy. She leans in the passenger side and points back and
says it’s about three miles. en she smiles real pretty and turns
back to jog some more.
I know this is my only chance with her—another second and
she’ll be gone. So I open the door, jump out, and run up behind
her. I whack her real hard from behind and she goes sprawling.
en I grab her. She kinda gasps as she realizes what’s happening
and tries to get away from me. But even though she’s tall and
strong for a girl, I’m nearly a foot taller than her and have to have
more than a hundred pounds on her. I hold on to her and whack
her on the side of the head as hard as I can, which must make her
see stars. Even so, she still puts up one hell of a fight, tries to beat
the shit out of me to get away. She’s gonna pay for that, all right;
no bitch is gonna treat me that way.
“Don’t touch me! Get away!” she’s screaming. I have to
practically smother her to get her over close to the car. I whack
her again, which makes her wobbly on her feet, then I grab her
and put her in the car on the passenger side.
Just then, I see two men who’ve been jogging run up toward
the car and they’re shouting. So I gun the engine and get the hell
out of Dodge.
I know I have to get off the base; that is the first thing. So I
head down the road toward the gate near the base theater; that’s
the only one that’s open this time of night. I know because it was
the one I came in. I prop her up in the seat next to me to look
like she’s my date. Her head’s resting on my shoulder, real
romantic-like. In the darkness it must be working, because the
guard doesn’t even react, just passes us through.
We’re out on Navy Road when she starts coming to and
begins screaming again; she threatens to call the cops if I don’t let
her go.
No one talks to me that way. It’s not about what she wants
anymore; it’s about what I want. I’m fucking in control, not her.
So I take a hand off the wheel and backhand her hard across the
face. at quiets her down.
I know I can’t bring her home. My old lady could be back by
now. What am I gonna do—explain that this is what I really
should be doing to her? I need somewhere me and this new bitch
can be alone, that we won’t be disturbed. I need to go somewhere
I feel comfortable. Somewhere I know. Somewhere I know I can
do what I have to, where no one’ll interrupt us. I got an idea.
I drive down to the end of the road and turn right into the
park—Edmund Orgill Park, it’s called. I think she might be
starting to wake up again, so I whack her good across the side of
the, head. I drive past the basketball courts, past the rest rooms
and stuff toward the other end of the park, near the lake. I stop
the car near the bank and turn off the motor. Now we’re all
alone.
I grab her by the shirt and yank her out of the car. She’s sort
of half-conscious, moaning. ere’s a cut around her eye and
blood coming from her nose and mouth. I get away from the car
and sling her onto the ground, but she starts to get up. e bitch
is still trying to resist me. So I jump on top of her—kind of
straddling like—and smack her around some more.
ere’s this tall tree with spreading branches nearby. It’s kind
of cozy and romantic. She’s mine now. I’m in control. I can do
anything to her I want. I tear off her clothes—Nike running
shoes, then her fancy Marine T-shirt and her little shorts and the
blue sweat belt around her waist. ere’s not much fight left in
her. She isn’t so tough anymore. I rip everything off her—even
her socks. She’s trying to escape or get away, but she can’t do
much. I am in control. I can decide whether this bitch lives or
dies and how she’s gonna die. It’s all up to me. For the first time
tonight, I feel like somebody.
While I press my forearm down on her neck to keep her
quiet, I start going for her breast—the left one. But that’s just for
starters. I’m gonna give it to this bitch like she’s never had it
before.
I look around. I stand up for a moment, reach up above me
and grab a limb from the tree, snap it off—about two and a half,
three feet’s worth. It’s hard because that sucker’s almost two
inches thick. e end is sharp where it broke off, like an
arrowhead or a spear.
She seemed like she was out cold just before, but she screams
loud again. Her eyes are wild with pain. God, with all that blood,
I’ll bet she’s a virgin. e bitch just screams in agony.
Here’s for all the women who ever shit on me, I’m saying to
myself. Here’s for all the people who gave me a raw deal. Here’s
to life—let someone else get shafted for a change! By now she’s
stopped struggling.
After the frenzy is over and the wildness is done, I start feeling
calmer. I lean back and look down at her.
She’s completely quiet and still. Her body is pale and emptylooking, like something’s gone. I know she’s finally dead and for
the first time in a hell of a long time, I feel completely alive.
•••
is is what it means to walk in the shoes, to know both victim
and subject—how each interacts with the other. is is what you
get from spending hours in the prisons and penitentiaries, sitting
across the table, listening to the actual stories. After you’ve heard
from them, you begin to put the pieces together. e crime itself
begins to talk to you. As horrible as it sounds, this is what you
have to do to be effective.
I described this technique to a reporter interviewing me not
long ago and she said, “I can’t even think about this kind of
thing!”
I replied, “Well, we’d better all think about this if we ever
want to have fewer of them to think about.”
If you understand—not in some academic, intellectual way,
but in a visceral, experiential way—then maybe we can begin to
make a difference.
What I’ve just described was my idea of what had happened
late on the night of July 11, 1985, and in the early morning of
July 12—the day U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Suzanne Marie
Collins—an accomplished, well-loved, exuberant, and beautiful
young woman of nineteen—had died in a public park near the
Memphis Naval Air Station, just northeast of Millington,
Tennessee. e five-foot-seven, 118-pound Lance Corporal
Collins had left her barracks for a run shortly after 10:00 P.M. and
never came back. Her nude and beaten body had been discovered
in the park after she missed morning muster. e causes of death
were reported as prolonged manual strangulation, blunt-force
trauma to the head, and massive internal hemorrhage from a
sharply beveled tree limb being thrust so far into her body that it
tore through her abdominal organs, liver, diaphragm, and right
lung. She had been scheduled to graduate on the twelfth from a
four-month avionics school in pursuit of her goal of becoming
one of the first female Marine aviators.
It was always a searing and gut-wrenching experience to go
through this exercise, but that’s what I had to do if I were going
to be able to see the crime through the offender’s eyes. I’d already
put myself through it from the victim’s point of view, and that
was almost unbearable. But it was also my job, a job I’d created
for myself as the first full-time criminal profiler at the Behavioral
Science division of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
Normally when my group—the Investigative Support Unit—
was called in, it was to provide a behavioral profile and
investigative strategy to help police hunt down an UNSUB: an
unknown subject. By this time, I’d already worked on more than
1,100 such cases since I came to Quantico. But this time the
authorities already had a suspect in custody when they called. His
name was Sedley Alley—a bearded, twenty-nine-year-old white
male from Ashland, Kentucky, six feet four inches tall, 220
pounds, a laborer for an air-conditioning company who lived on
base as a dependent to his wife, Lynne, who was enlisted in the
Navy. ey already had a confession from him; in fact, they’d
gotten it the next morning. But his version of events was
somewhat different from mine.
Agents of the Naval Investigative Service had picked him up
from the car description of two male joggers and the base gate
guard. Alley told them that he’d been depressed after his wife,
Lynne, had gone out to her Tupperware party, that he’d finished
off three six-packs of beer and a bottle of wine in the house, then
had gone out in his old and dying green Mercury station wagon
to the mini-mart near the post commissary to buy some more
beer.
He said he was becoming increasingly intoxicated as he drove
aimlessly, until he saw an attractive white female in a Marine Tshirt and running shorts cross the street as she was jogging. He
said he got out of his car and started jogging with her,
exchanging small talk, until after a few minutes he became
winded from his drinking and smoking. He wanted to tell her his
problems, but didn’t feel she would care about them since she
didn’t know him, so he said goodbye and drove off.
In his drunken state, he reported, he was drifting and weaving
back and forth across the road. He knew he shouldn’t be driving.
en he heard a thump and felt a jolt in his car. He realized he’d
struck her.
He put her in his car, telling her he was going to take her to
the hospital, but he said she kept resisting him, threatening to
have him arrested for DWI. He drove off the base and headed for
Edmund Orgill Park, where he stopped the car and hoped to
calm her down and talk her out of turning him in.
But in the park she continued berating him, he claimed,
telling him how much trouble he was in. He yelled at her to shut
up and when she tried to open the door, he grabbed her by the
shirt, opened his door, got out, and pulled her out with him. She
was still yelling about how she was going to have him arrested,
then tried to break away. So he jumped on top of her and
straddled her on the ground, just to keep her from running off.
Alley just wanted to talk to her.
She kept trying to get away; he described it as “wiggling.” At
that point, he “lost it for a second” and hit her across the face—
first once, then once or twice more—with his open hand.
He was scared and knew he was in trouble if she turned him
in. He says he got off her, trying to figure out what to do, and
went back to the Mercury for the yellow-handled screwdriver he
needed to hot-start the car and when he came back, he heard
someone running in the dark. Panicked, he wheeled around and
flung up his arm, which happened to be holding the screwdriver.
It turned out to be the girl he struck, and the screwdriver must
have hit her and penetrated the side of the head, because she
collapsed onto the ground.
At this point he didn’t know what to do. Should he just run
away, maybe go back to Kentucky? He didn’t know. He decided
he’d have to make the death look like something else, like she was
attacked and raped. But, of course, he hadn’t had sex with her—
her injury and death had all been a horrible accident—so how
was he going to make it look like a sexual attack?
He removed her clothes from her body—that was a start—
then dragged her by the ankles away from the car, over to the
lake bank, and placed her under a tree. He was grasping at
straws, desperate to think of something, when he stretched his
hand out and came in contact with a tree limb, and without even
consciously thinking about it, he broke it off. en he rolled her
over onto her stomach and pushed the stick into her, just once,
he claimed, just enough to make it look like she’d been attacked
by a sex maniac. He ran back to his car, hurriedly left the scene,
and left the park at the opposite end from where he’d driven in.
Henry “Hank” Williams, assistant district attorney for Shelby
County, Tennessee, was trying to sort the whole thing out.
Williams was one of the best in the business—an imposinglooking former FBI agent in his early forties with strong, chiseled
features, kindly, sensitive eyes, and prematurely white hair. He’d
never seen such a gruesome case.
“As soon as I looked at the file, I thought this was definitely a
death penalty case,” Williams commented. “I wasn’t going to
plea-bargain this one.”
e problem as he saw it, though, would be to come up with
a motive for such a savage murder that a jury could understand.
After all, who in his right mind could do such a horrible thing?
at was the angle the defense was playing. Aside from Alley’s
account of the “accidental” death, they were raising the specter of
insanity. It seemed that psychiatrists examining the subject at the
instruction of the defense had proposed that Alley suffered from
multiple personality disorder. He had neglected to inform the
Naval Investigative Service agents who’d interviewed him that
first day that apparently he had been split into three personalities
on the night Suzanne Collins died: himself; Billie, a female
personality; and Death, who had ridden a horse next to the car in
which Sedley and Billie had been riding.
Williams contacted Special Agent Harold Hayes, the profile
coordinator in the FBI’s Memphis office. He described to
Williams the concept of lust murder and referred him to an
article my colleague Roy Hazelwood and I had written five years
earlier for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, entitled “e Lust
Murderer.” ough “lust,” in such cases, is something of a
misnomer, the article described what our research into serial
killers had shown us about these loathsome, sexually based
crimes of manipulation, domination, and control. e killing of
Suzanne Collins seemed to be a classic lust murder—a
premeditated act willfully committed by a sane individual with a
character disorder such that while he knew the difference
between right and wrong, he wasn’t going to let that moral
distinction get in his way.
Williams asked me onto the case to advise him on prosecution
strategy and figure out how to convince a jury of twelve good
men and women who probably had little direct contact with raw
evil in their lives that my version of events made more sense than
the defendant’s.
e first thing I had to do was explain to the prosecution
team some of what my people and I had learned during our years
of fighting crime from a behavioral perspective . . . as well as the
particular price we’d paid to learn it.
I had to take them along on my own journey into darkness.
Look for
Journey Into Darkness
Wherever Paperback Books Are Sold
From Pocket Books
About the Authors
JOHN DOUGLAS is a former special agent with the U.S. Federal
Bureau of Investigation, one of the first criminal profilers, and a
criminal psychology writer. After retiring from the FBI, where he
headed the elite Investigative Support Unit, he helped set up
Mindhunters, Inc., with Mark Olshaker, a site that provides
information on their writing as well as criminal justice and
profiler resources.
MARK OLSHAKER is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and a
New York Times bestselling nonfiction author. His nine books
with former FBI special agent and criminal profiling pioneer
John Douglas have sold millions of copies, been translated into
many languages, and, along with his Emmy-nominated PBS film
Mind of a Serial Killer, made Olshaker a sought-after speaker and
consultant on law enforcement-related issues.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/John-Douglas
authors.simonandschuster.com/Mark-Olshaker
JOHN DOUGLAS AND MARK OLSHAKER
Nonfiction
Unabomber: On the Trail of America’s Most-Wanted Serial Killer
Obsession: e FBI’s Legendary Profiler Probes the Psyches of Killers,
Rapists, and Stalkers and eir Victims and Tells How to Fight Back
e Anatomy of Motive: e FBI’s Legendary Mindhunter Explores
the Key to Understanding and Catching Violent Criminals
e Cases at Haunt Us: From Jack the Ripper to JonBenet
Ramsey, the FBI’s Legendary Mindhunter Shes Light on the
Mysteries at Won’t Go Away
Journey into Darkness: e FBI’s Premier Investigator Penetrates the
Minds and Motives of the Most Terrifying Serial Killers
Law & Disorder: Inside the Dark Heart of Murder
Fiction
Broken Wings
JOHN DOUGLAS
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, with Ann W. Burgess and
Robert K. Ressler
John Douglas’s Guide to Careers in the FBI
Anyone You Want Me to Be: A True Story of Sex and Death on the
Internet, with Stephen Singular
John Douglas’s Guide to Landing a Career in Law Enforcement
Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating
and Classifying Violent Crimes, with Ann W. Burgess, Allen G.
Burgess, and Robert K. Ressler
MARK OLSHAKER
Nonfiction
e Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience
Virus Hunter: irty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the
World, with C.J. Peters
Fiction
Einstein’s Brain
Blood Race
Unnatural Causes
e Edge
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Index
Abbot, Jack Henry, 350–51
Adams, Roger, 251
Air Force, U.S., 36–41, 48, 85
Aitken, Patricia, 255
Albee, Edward, 143
Alderson, Anne, 148–49, 151
American Journal of Psychiatry, 135
American Law Institute Model Penal Code Test, 346
Amodio, Alphonse, Jr., 362–63
Amurao, Corazon, 122
Ankrom, Larry, 258, 321
arson, 139, 153
Atkins, Susan, 114
Atlanta child murders, 9, 106, 198–224
concert ploy in, 210–11
Douglas’s quote in, 214–15
impostors in, 206–09
profile in, 201–05
Ault, Dick, 82, 85, 96, 159
Baird, Jeff, 256
Baker, Ken, 337
Baltazar, Patrick, 211, 230
bank robberies:
techniques for, 85–86
tellers trained for, 86
“Barbie doll cases,” 357–58
Barnes, Wendell, 251
Bayless, Michael Brad, 219
Bazelon, David, 346
Beadle, Roberta, 379–80
bed-wetting, 139, 153, 156
Beethe, Carol Marie, 255
Behavioral Science Unit, 3, 8, 80, 92, 96
“road schools” at, 97
Bell, Camille, 199
Bell, Griffin, 200
Bell, Larry Gene, 313–19
questioning of, 315–18
Bell, Yussef, 198, 199
Berest, Peter, 155
Berkowitz, David, 142, 157, 165, 179, 297, 324, 376
note sent by, 141–42
prison interview with, 137–44
Berliner, Anna, 356
Bianchi, Kenneth, 351
Binder, Al, 217, 219, 221, 224
Biner, John, 21
bite-marks, 267–69, 275
Bittaker, Lawrence, 172–73
Bloch, Robert, 87
Blythe, Dennis, 347, 348
Bolz, Frank, 83
bombers, 331–33
profile of, 331–32
Bond, Roxanne, 276
Bond, Spencer, 276
Boriello, Leonard, 347, 348, 352
Boston Strangler, 22
Bosworth, Charles, Jr., 269
Brantley, Al, 350
Bremmer, Arthur, 111, 337–38
Breslin, Jimmy, 142
Brooklyn Eagle, 216
Brown, Frances, 121
Brown, Jo Ellen, 265
Brown, Karla, murder of, 261–83, 322
profile, 270–74
Brown, Lee, 199, 200, 213
Brudos, Darcie, 129–130
Brudos, Jerry, 127–32
prison interview with, 128–29
Brussel, James A., 21–22, 332
BTK strangler, 139, 375–76
Bundy, Ted, 50, 64, 152, 267–68, 327
Burgess, Alan “Smokey,” 287, 378–79
Burgess, Allen, 354
Burgess, Ann, 117–18, 144, 205, 274, 354, 379
Busch, Alva, 261, 264, 266–69, 270
Byrne, Ray, 77
Calabro, Carmine, 164–65, 179, 268
prison interview with, 165–66
Campbell, Bob, 212
Campbell, Homer, 267–68
Carpenter, David, 155–56, 244
Carr, Richard, 73–75
Carr, Sam, 143
Carter, Anthony, 200
Carter, Jimmy, 83, 359
Carter, Nathaniel, 213, 214, 217
Case, Mary, 275
Casper, Joe “the Friendly Ghost,” 46
celebrities, stalking of, 337–38, 359–63
Chandler, Oba, 322–23
Chapman, Mark David, prison interview with, 337
Chase, Richard Trenton, 352
Chicago Tribune, 328
Christopher, Joseph, 251–52
Clarence, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of, 372–73, 374
Cohen, Jacob, 73–75, 76
Collins, John Norman, 63–64
Collins, Wilkie, 20, 288
colors, aggression and, 127
Columbell, Tom, 8
Committee to Stop Children’s Murders, 199
computers, profiles and, 147, 170–71
Connell, Richard, 239
contract spouse killings, 225–38
control, 108
Conway, John, 99, 103
Cooper, Clarence, 218
Cooper, Greg, 183–86, 258–59, 354
Cooper, Rhonda, 184–85
Cornell Farm Cadet Program, 27
Cotter, Jim, 89, 92
Crime Classification Manual (Douglas, Ressler and Burgess), 354, 379
crime scenes, 13, 81, 356–57
criminal insanity, 339–58
cruelty to animals, 139, 153, 156, 358
Dahmer, Jeffrey, 257, 356, 375
D’Amato, Alfonse, 359
D’Amico, Joe, 159, 165
Davis, Charlie, 14–16
Deadman, Hal, 217, 219, 220
Degnan, Suzanne, 121
Del Campo, Joe, 52, 72, 73–75
Depue, Roger, 7, 9, 368, 378
Devier, Darrell Gene, 189–93
Dietz, Park, 205, 208, 218, 257, 344–45, 349, 351–52, 380
disorganized personality type, 175
Dog Day Afternoon,
Domaille, John, 206–07
domination, 108
D’Onstan, Roslyn, 373
Douglas, Arlene, 25, 31, 132, 196–97
Douglas, Dolores, 7, 34, 182–83
Douglas, Erika, 5, 9, 10, 78, 88, 197, 307, 376, 378
Douglas, Jack, 7, 183, 216
Douglas, Jed, 378, 383
Douglas, John, 25–43
Air Force career of, 36–41, 48, 75
baseball and football played by, 27–28
censuring of, 216
defense mechanisms of, 377
divorce of, 376
early jobs of, 28–30
FBI joined by, 42–43, 44–48
illness of, 1–2, 6–9, 11, 370
legal troubles of, 31–34
marriage of, 10
prioritizing of cases by, 167–68
retirement of, 382
study of serial killers and, 117–18, 119–20
as teacher, 97–99
theft of gun of, 51–52
as unit head, 379–80
as visual person, 274
wedding of, 69–71
Douglas, Lauren, 5, 9, 78, 239, 307, 376, 378
Douglas, Pam Modica, 4, 7–8, 9, 10, 62–67, 69–72, 78, 88, 145, 183, 376–78
Dover, Larry, 288–90
Dover, Linda Haney, murder of, 288–90
profile, 288–90
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 18–19, 20–21
Druit, Montague John, 372–73
Duffy, Patrick, 371
Duncan, Eddie, 212
Dunn, Glenn, 249
Dupin, C. August (fictional), 19
Durham v. United States, 346
Dykstra, Connie, 266
Edelstein, David, 363
Edwards, Parler, 249, 251
Eirenarcha, 345
“Eklutna Annie,” 241
electroencephalography, 123
Elveson, Francine, murder of, 157–66, 179, 268, 357
profile, 159–68
Esta machine, 312
Etter, Steve, 321
Evans, Alfred, 198–99
evidence, 168
forensic, 165
hold-up notes as, 86
victim’s body as, 86–87
exploding money packs, 86
extortion calls, 85, 332–34
Fair, Mark, 261, 263, 265–66
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 117, 120
FBI Story, e (Whitehead), 54
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI):
changing role of behavioral sciences at, 96
recruiting for, 68–69
see also specific departments and units
Fiegenbaum, Tom, 262, 263–64, 265–66
fire-starting, see arson
Fitzpatrick, Bob, 51, 56–57, 60–61
Fleszar, Mary, 63
Foley, Tom, 159
foot fetishes, 130–32
Forces of Evil, 225–27
Ford, Gerald R., 111
Foster, Jodie, 337
Fox Is Crazy, Too, e (Trapnell), 353
Frazier, John Linley, 101
“Fred” (special agent), 89–90
Fromme, Lynette “Squeaky,” 111, 363
Frye, Dale, 176
Fulton, Arthur, 77
Gacy, John Wayne, 351
Gaddini, Robert, 149, 152
Gary, Carlton, 227
Gaslight East, 28–29
Gein, Edward, 87, 205, 375
George, Anthony, 290–91
George, David, 263
Glass, Darron, 200
Glenn, Scott, 171–72
Glover, John, 223, 233, 235
Goldberg, David, 72
Goldberg, Sarah, 72
Golding, Paula, 241
government witnesses, 192–95
Gray, L. Patrick, 69, 89
Green, Harold, 249
Greene, Bob, 328
Green River case, 3–6, 184, 367–72
profile, 367–68
Greer, Don, 269, 277
Guillen, omas, 368
Gull, William, 373
Haertle, Steven, 154
Hagmaier, Bill, 8, 9, 166, 183, 268, 278, 321, 378
Haines, Frank, 42
Hallett, Sally, 102
Hance, William H., 227
Hansen, Ellen Marie, 154
Hansen, Robert, 3, 239–49, 369
Harris, omas, 87, 147, 383
Harvey (dog), 143
Harvey, Milton, 198, 200
Hays, Ed “Fast Eddie,” 67
Hazelwood, Roy, 11, 24, 95, 117–18, 150–51, 156, 159, 201–02, 205, 219, 278, 280,
354, 365, 373–74, 378, 381
Heirens, William, 121–22, 123
prison interview with, 121–22
Helmick, Debra May, murder of, 306–07, 308, 311, 315, 318–19, 378
profile, 303–04, 307–08, 315–37
Hempstead High School, 27–28
Henry, John, 149
Hickman, Karen, 227
Higdon, Martin, 276
Hill, Timmie, 212
Hillside Strangler, 351, 376
Hinckley, John, 337, 359, 361
Hogan, Jerry, 76–77, 78
Holmes, Sherlock (fictional), 18, 20–21
“homicidal triad,” 139
Hoover, J. Edgar, 44, 52, 54–55, 57–59, 62, 69, 81
Horn, Jim, 9, 242, 275
hostage situations:
Cohen in, 73–75, 76
demands in, 76, 83, 84
profiles, 82–84
Stockholm syndrome in, 82
Howenstein, G. Albert, Jr., 149–50
Hoxie, Herb, 68, 73, 74, 76
“I-40 Killer,” 247
interrogation techniques, 190–92, 193
In the Belly of the Beast (Abbot), 350
Ivey, Robert, 299, 309
Jackson, Gail, 225–26, 227
Jackson, Maynard, 199, 200
Jack the Ripper, 18, 20–21, 372–75, 376
Jensen, Keith, 269, 277, 278
Johnson, Aldrich, 252
Johnson, Lynde, 136, 378
Jones, Clifford, 200
Jones, Ernest, 249
Jones, Jim, 115
Judson, Donna, 266
Judson, Terry, 266
Kane, Edda, 148–49
Keaton, Rich, 151
Kellerman, Mary, 329
Kelley, Clarence, 89
Kemp, Jack, 359
Kemper, Clarnell, 100, 104
Kemper, Ed, 112, 119, 123, 129, 131, 132, 136, 343, 349, 364, 367, 375
case of, 99–104
prison interview with, 103–10
Kemper, Ed (father), 99–100
Kemper, Susan, 104
Kent, Constance, 287–88
Kent, Francis, 287
Keppel, Bob, 256
Keyes, Charlie, 305
kidnappings, 286–87
Kim (Douglas’s niece), 196–97
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 89
Kitchens, Jim, 217
Kohl, David, 75, 379
Koo, Aiko, 100
Koresh, David, 115–16
Kosminski, Aaron, 373, 374, 375
Kraske, Richard, 367
Ku Klux Klan, 202
Kunst, Jack, 52, 57, 62
LaFond, Robert, 40–41
Lambard, William, 345
Lanier, Angel, 199
Lanning, Ken, 95, 183, 354, 381
Lano, Renee C., 254
Lauria, Donna, 143
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), 68
Lawson, James Clayton, Jr., 173–175
leadership, 115
Leary, Robert, 186
Leik, David, 63
Lennon, John, 337, 338
Levine, Andrea, 255
Levine, Lowell, 268–69, 272, 275
Levine, Matthew, 252
Lewis, Bob, 264–65
Lewis, Dorothy, 347, 351
Lincoln, Abraham, 361
Liu, Alice, 102
Luchessa, Anita, 101
Ludlum Elementary School, 25–26
Luke, James, 169
Lumet, Sidney, 82
Lundsford, Chuck, 47
McCarty, Lewis, 299, 305–06, 307, 308–09
McCaslin, Henry, 92
McCoy, Joseph, 249, 250
McCrary, Gregg, 106, 136, 284–87, 346, 348, 354, 371, 378, 380
McDermand, Mark, 149
McGonigel, Bob, 52, 56–57, 60–61, 62, 64, 71
McIlwain, Blaine, 5, 6–7, 9, 278, 308, 370
McKenzie, Jim, 9, 215, 224, 278
M’Naghten, Daniel, 345
M’Naghten Rule, 345
Mad Bomber, 21–22, 165
Maddox, Kathleen, 113
Mailer, Norman, 350
Main, Paul, 264–66, 268, 274, 275, 277–78
Mallard, Jack, 217, 221–22
Manhunt Live, 184, 372
manipulation, 108, 137
Manson, Charles, 173
guru qualities of, 112, 114–15
prison interview with, 111–17
Mardigian, Steve, 253, 321, 335
Marquette, Richard, 349, 375
Martin, Dean, 145
Mathers, Rick, 7
Mathis, Jeffrey, 199
Mathis, R. William, 150
Mattas, Oliver E., Jr., 176
Maude (Kemper’s grandmother), 100
May, Shauna, 149
medical examiner’s report, 169
Menjivar, Anna Kelly, 155–56
Menominee Reservation, 77–78
Messina, Joanne, 241
Metesky, George, 165
Metts, Jim, 298–99, 301–02, 303, 309, 314–15, 378
Meyers, Don, 316, 317, 318
Michigan Murders, 63
Middlebrook, Eric, 199
Midtown Slasher, 251
military deserters, 49–50
Miller, Gordon, 217, 218
Minnick, Dale, 290–91
Miron, Murray, 362
Missing and Murdered Task Force, 200
MO (modus operandi):
of Davis, 14–16
signature vs., 252–53, 256–57
Modica, Pam, see Douglas, Pam Modica
Modica, Rosalie, 64–65
Monroe, Jana, 184–85,
321–23
Monroe, Larry, 205, 215
Montgomery, Robin, 380
Moonstone, e (Collins), 20, 288
Moore, Cory, 82, 83, 84
Moore, Sarah Jane, 111, 363
Moreland, Cynthia, 149
Morrow, Sherry, 241
Mosely, Gregory, 258–59
Moskowitz, Stacy, 142
“Most Dangerous Game, e” (Connell), 239, 244
mothers, children killed by, 284–88
Mullany, Patrick, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84–85, 92, 95–96
Mullin, Herbert, 101
“Murders in the Rue Morgue, e” (Poe), 19, 21
My Sister Sam, 338
Mystery Writers of America, 384
Naly, Tom, 61–62
Nance, Wayne, 339–40
National Academy session, 88–93
pranks at, 90–91
Native Americans, 77–78
Newton, Beverly, 147
New York Post, 359, 362
Nixon, Richard M., 338
Norris, Roy, 172–73
O’Connell, Diana, 149
O’Connor, Tom, 275, 276
Odom, James Russell, 173–75
Office of Professional Responsibility, 10, 215–16
Oklahoma City bombing, 55
Oldfield, George, 206
O’Shea, Margaret, 309–11
Otero, Joseph, 375
Otero, Joseph, II, 375
Otero, Josephine, 375
Otero, Julie, 375
paraphilias, 95, 130–32
Payne, Jimmy Ray, 213, 217
Peel, Robert, 345
Pennell, Steven, 247, 253–55
People, 10, 214, 216
Pesce, Mary Ann, 101
Peterson, Larry, 214, 217, 219
Pfaff, Jack, 81, 85
Poe, Edgar Allan, 19–20, 21
Pohlreich, Mary Anne, 255
posing, staging vs., 256
Prante, John, 264–66, 268, 274, 276–78, 322
press, serial killers’ following of, 209, 282, 309–11
pretext calls, 52
Price, Charlie, 47
prison interviews, 30, 111, 118
with Berkowitz, 137–44
with Brudos, 128–29
with Calabro, 165–66
with Chapman, 337
with Davis, 14–16
with Heirens, 121–22
with Kemper, 99–100
with Manson, 111–17
with Speck, 122–126
with Vanda, 335–36
proactive techniques, 5–6, 19, 52
profiles, 13–14, 15–16, 95–96, 145–47
in Atlanta child murders, 201–05
of bombers, 331–33
in Brown murder, 270–74
computers and, 147, 170–71
in Dover murder, 288–91
in Elveson murder, 159–66
in Green River case, 367–69
for Green River Task Force, 5–6
in Hansen case, 242–46
in hostage situations, 82–84
importance of, 5
of Mad Bomber, 21–22
Poe on, 19–20
in Rogers case, 321–22
singularity and, 18–19
in Smith murder, 303–04, 307–08, 315–16
techniques for, 147–48
in threatening letters case, 359–360
in Tylenol tampering case, 324–26
in Vetter murder, 281–83
“profiling machine,” 170–71
Project Head Start, 365
prosecutorial strategy, 18–19
psychiatrists, 136–37, 196, 342–45, 353–54
psychics, 147, 148, 268
Psycho, 87, 351
psycholinguistics, 362
Psychology Today, 165
Pue, Terry, 209, 211
rapist, “power reassurance” vs. “anger excitation,” 135
Ray, James Earl, 80
Ray, Jud, 63, 134, 225–38, 278, 354, 382
Reactive Crimes Unit, 49
Reagan, Ronald, 337, 359, 361–62
Redfern, Bill, 264
Reeder, John, 175–76
Reese, Jim, 242, 381
Ressler, Robert, 82, 85, 96–97, 103, 111, 112, 117, 120–21, 128, 133, 139, 144, 156,
206, 214, 226, 257, 341, 355, 378, 381
Richardson, Christopher, 199
Rider, Tony, 159
Rissell, Monte, 132–33, 161, 247, 343
“road schools,” 97
Roe, Rebecca, 256, 257
Rogers, Christie, 320
Rogers, Joan, 320–23
Rogers, Michelle, 320–23
Rogers, Patrick, 211
Rogers case, 320–23
profile, 321–22
Rushing, Randy, 269
Ruskin, Esther, 78
Ruskin, Sam, 78
Russell, George, Jr., 255–58, 265
Russo, Rosanne, 166, 235, 268
Sagowski, Bob, 329
Samenow, Stanton, 344
Samples, Duane, 354–55
Sandy (girlfriend), 34–35
Scaggs, Heather Rozanne, 154–55
Schaeffer, Rebecca, 338
Schall, Cindy, 101–02
Schell, Joan, 63
Schlossberg, Harvey, 83
Schwartz, Barbara, 149–50, 155
Schwartz, Miriam, 255
Search for the Green River Killer, e (Smith and Guillen), 368
search warrants, profiles and, 243
Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper, e, 373
Secret Service, U.S., 359–63
sense of humor, 75
serial killers:
adopted children as, 138
changing face of crime and, 17–18
displaced anger of, 109
dysfunctional childhoods of, 126–27, 131, 156, 348, 364
fantasy lives of, 108, 129, 140, 162
female, 363–64
improvement as obsession of, 129
motivations of, 108, 137
organized vs. disorganized, 126
partners as, 172–73
as police buffs, 106, 213
press followed by, 137, 210, 282, 309–11
psychiatrists fooled by, 137, 196, 342–44, 352–54
racial lines rarely crossed by, 161, 202, 281, 307–08
random, 323–24
remorse of, 119
retirement of, 329
signatures of, 59, 252–53
stressors on, 134, 152, 180
thinking like, 12–13, 18, 111, 171–72
trophies of, 109, 127–28, 140, 150, 181, 245–46
Volkswagens preferred by, 50–51, 173, 248, 272, 276
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (Douglas with Ressler and Burgess), 144
Shade, Betty Jane, murder of, 176–81
Shakespeare, William, 372
Shawcross, Arthur J., 106, 136, 350, 351, 353–54
as insane, 347–49
Sheba (dog), 220
Sheppard, Ellis, 312–13
Sheppard, Joe, Sr., 265–66
Sheppard, Sharon, 312–13
shoe fetishes, 130–32
Siegal (physician), 8
Sigma Phi Epsilon, 31
signature, 59
MO vs., 252–53, 256
Silence of the Lambs, e, 171–72, 381, 383
Silent Witness (Weber and Bosworth), 269
Simpson, O.J., 354
Siragusa, Charles, 351, 355
Slawson, Linda, 128
Smerick, Pete, 354
Smith, Carlton, 368
Smith, Dawn, 302–03, 305–06, 309, 310–11, 317–18, 319
Smith, Edward, 198
Smith, Hilda, 299, 302–03, 313, 317–18
Smith, Robert, 298–99, 305
Smith, Shari Faye, murder of, 298–319, 378
letter in, 300–01
profile, 303–04, 307–08, 315–16
sister as bait in, 305–07, 310–12
Smith, Susan, 286, 296
Son of Sam, see Berkowitz, David
Soult, Charles F. “Butch,” Jr., 178–81
Speck, Richard, 135, 341
prison interview with, 122–26
staging, 193, 270, 271, 289, 290, 369
posing vs., 256
stalking, 335–38
Stockholm syndrome, 82
Stocking Strangler, 225–27
Stoner, Mary Frances, murder of, 186–96, 220, 271
profile, 187–89
Stowers, Richard, 149
stressors, 134, 152, 180
Stuart, Carol, murder of, 296–97
Stuart, Charles, 296–97
Surf Club, 28–29
Sutcliffe, Peter, 207
Tafoya, Bill, 365
Task Force Omega, 142
Tate, Sharon, 116
Tate and LaBianca Murders, 112, 113–17
Terrell, Earl, 200
Teten, Howard, 22, 79, 81, 94, 95, 96, 156
irkield, Irene, 227
orpe, Rosalind, 102
orpe Award, 28
threatening letters, 359–63
profiles and, 359–60
Trailside Killer, 3, 148–57, 244, 369
profile, 150–51, 152–57
Trapnell, Gary, 30, 196–97, 352–53
“trophies,” 109, 127–28, 140, 150, 181, 245–46
Turner, Bill, 36
.22-Caliber Killer, 3, 249–53, 369
Tylenol tampering case, 323–30
profile, 324–26
UFAP (Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution) Squad, 49
Unabomber, 332
United States v. Brawner, 346
Unsolved Mysteries, 322
Ustinov, Peter, 373
Vancil, Edna, 264
Vanda, omas, prison interview with, 341–43
Vetter, Donna Lynn, murder of, 278–83
profile, 281–83
Violante, Robert, 142
Vorpagel, Russ, 257
Walker, Curtis, 212
Walker, Ron, 5, 6–7, 9, 278, 299, 303, 307–08, 314, 315, 316, 370
Wallace, George, 111, 337–38
Watson, Charles “Tex,” 113, 116
Watson, Wayne, 275
Weber, Don, 261, 266, 268–69, 270
Webster, William, 8, 156, 203, 216, 278
Welch, Neil, 56–57, 59
Welcome, Mary, 217, 223
Welles, Doug, 339–40
Welles, Kris, 338–40
Whicher, Jonathan, 287
Whitaker, Allen, 367
White, Mark, 276
White, Rick, 269, 276
White, Vicki, 276
Whitehead, Don, 54
Whitman, Charles, 347
Wiesinger, Cathy, 180
Williams, Wayne, 3, 9, 212–24, 327, 369
trial of, 216–24
Wilson, LaTonya, 199, 203
Wolsieffer, Betty, murder of, 290–96
Wolsieffer, Danielle, 291, 292
Wolsieffer, Edward Glen, 290–96
Wolsieffer, Elizabeth Jayne, 290–91
Wolsieffer, Neil, 290–91
Woman in White, e (Collins), 20
Wright, Jim, 184, 235, 278, 280, 297, 299, 303, 307, 321, 354, 378, 381
Wyche, Aaron, 199
Y chromosomes, extra, 122–23
Yochelson, Samuel, 344
Yorkshire Ripper, 3, 206–07, 214, 374–75
Zeiss, George, 80
Zodiac Killer, 150
Zoo Story, e (Albee), 143
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e Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Douglas, John E.
Mindhunter: inside the FBI’s elite serial crime unit/John Douglas and Mark Olshaker.
p.
em.
“A Lisa Drew book.”
Includes index.
1. Douglas, John E. 2. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Behavioral
Science Unit.—Officials and employees—Biography. 3. Serial murder investigation—
United States 4. Serial murders—United States—Psychology. I. Olshaker, Mark, date.
II. Title.
HV7911.D68A3
1995
363.2‘59523‘092—dc20
[B]
95–33410
CIP
ISBN 978-1-5011-5863-6
ISBN(ebook) 978-0-6848-6447-1